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DYNAMITE 
STORIES 

AND 

SOME INTERESTING FACTS 
ABOUT EXPLOSIVES 



BY 

HUDSON MAXIM 

Author of " Defenseless America," "The Science 
of Poetry and the Philosophy of Language," etc. 




NEW YORK 
HEARST'S INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY CO. 









Copyright, 1916, by 
HUDSON MAXIM 



All rights reserved, including that of translation into the foreign 
languages, including the Scandinavian 



Pbintbd in the U. S. a. 

NOV 25 1916 
©CI.A445823 



DEDICATION" 

To the actors in the comedies and trag- 
edies of real life presented in these stories, 
without whose efforts and sacrifices the 
stories could not have been so interesting 
and true, this volume is with grateful ac- 
knowledgments most respectfully dedicated. 
As the parts played by the actors were not 
rehearsed, the performances have required a 
little retouching in the interest of the reader, 
the author having subordinated history to 
story rather than story to history. 

Hudson Maxim. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



PAOB 



Inteoduction 1 

The Fokgotten Bit of Fulminate . 25 

Hell Swazey Breaks up the Dance . 29 

The Poet's Uplift 34 

How Bender Lowered the Price of 

Dynamite 39 

Foolhardy Ejeiuger 42 

Discharging Pat 45 

Lines to a Lady 47 

He Separated 50 

The Well-Digger's Casualties . . 53 

The Eival Editors 55 

The Passing of ^^ Jeopardy'' ... 58 

The Involuntary Attack ... 59 

Hoist with His Own Petard . . 62 

The Forgotten Precaution ... 64 

The Fatal Hat ..... 67 

A Drop too Much 6S 

A Close Call 70 

[vli] 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

A Pickaninny's Teeasure Trove 

Not to Be Buncoed . 

Sir Frederick's Bonfire 

The Irreverent Native . 

At Folly's Mercy . 

The Watchman's Double Vision 

The Zealous Fool ., 

Some Lively Cotton Waste . 

Saving Time .... 

The Broken Scale . 

The Singular Good Fortune of 

TLE Englishman . 
The Match at the Peep-Hole 
The Flask of Liquor 
Impertinence Punished . 
Curiosity's Uplift . 
Proud even unto Death . 
The Dog That Ate Dynamite 
Insecure Security . 
The Loaded Chinaman . 
Living Bombs 

Ships That Passed in the Night 
A Wild Projectile . 

[ viii 1 



PAOB 

72 



Gen- 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



The Bomb and the Train . 




PAGB 

115 


The Missing Vessel 




117 


The Drunken Messenger 




118 


Nitroglycerin by Automobile 




122 


The Jets of Blue . . . . 




127 


The Wisdom of Eetreat . 




129 


The Eace with Death . 




131 


The Indomitable Poet . 




134 


Scattered 




136 


A Lively Dead One . 


^.1 


138 


Incidents in the Development of 


•Mo- 




toritb 




139 


The Mule Gun . ., . 




152 


How GussiE Got Loaded . 




154 


Dynamite's Freak . 




155 


Explosive Vagaries . 




157 


The Turkey That Went to Bed 




160 


Bill Bennett, Detective 




162 


Winning the Ox . . . 




164 


A Duel to the Death . 




166 


The Bewitched Flintlock , 




168 


When He Shirked . 




171 


The Elevation of Womanhood 


.1 


173 


[ix] 







TABLE OF CONTENTS 



PAOS 



Didn't Know It Was Loaded . . 178 

The Wrong Tap 180 

^* Whence All but Him Had Fled'* . 182 

Breaking His Ferve .... 184 

The Grizzly Cannon Ball . . . 186 

The Joke Was Not on the Chinamen 188 

Chinese Fireworks 190 

Brown, the Gunner . . . . 193 

The Happening of the Unexpected . 195 

When the Wash Vanished . . . 207 

The Frightened Fisherman . . . 211 

The Colonel Was Provoked . . . 213 

When the Darkies Turned Pale . . 215 

The Dog That Was a Eeal Mascot . 218 

Weary Willie's Discomfiture . . 220 

Lo, the Poor Indian! .... 224 



[X] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

INTEODUCTION 

SOME INTEEESTING FACTS ABOUT 
EXPLOSIVES 

A N explosive material consists of a com- 
A\ bustible and of an oxidizing agent for 
burning the combustible. Hence it 
contains within its own substance the neces- 
sary oxygen for its combustion, so that it 
will burn without atmospheric air and there- 
fore in a confined space. 

There are two main kinds of explosive ma- 
terials — high explosives and gunpowder. 
There are also two main kinds of high ex- 
plosives — dynamites and military high ex- 
plosives. Lastly, there are two main kinds 
of gunpowders — black, smoky gunpowder 
and smokeless gunpowder. 

Dynamite is used mostly for commercial 
blasting purposes, such as blasting rock in 
the construction of railways, and so forth, 

[1] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

Military high explosives are mostly em- 
ployed for submarine mines, warheads for 
torpedoes, and as bursting charges for high 
explosive projectiles. 

A high explosive is consumed almost in- 
stantly by what is called a detonative wave ; 
hence it is said to detonate. "When gun- 
powder explodes, it is not consumed by a de- 
tonative wave, but burns from the surface, 
and the more strongly it is confined, that is 
to say, the higher the pressure under which 
it is burned, the more rapid is its combus- 
tion. Although the action is rapid, it is yet 
much slower than is the action of detonation 
of high explosives. 

The name gunpowder is a misnomer, for 
gunpowder is no longer a powder, but is 
made in the form of hard and dense grains 
or sticks, according to the use for which it 
is intended. 

A gunpowder is smoky when its products 
of combustion are not all gaseous. Only 
about forty-four per cent, of the products of 
combustion of black gunpowder is gaseous. 
The rest is inert solid matter, which makes 
the smoke. 

The products of combustion of smokeless 

[2] 



FACTS ABOUT EXPLOSIVES 

powder, however, are practically all gaseous. 
Consequently, weight for weight, it is much 
more powerful than black powder. 

Black gunpowder is a mechanical mixture 
of charcoal, sulphur and saltpeter, the char- 
coal and sulphur being the combustible ele- 
ments, and the saltpeter the oxidizing 
element or the element that supplies the 
oxygen. 

In smokeless powder the oxygen is held in 
chemical union with nitrogen and hydrogen, 
but the bond between the nitrogen and the 
other elements is weak, so that when ignited 
the other more active elements are enabled 
easily to unite at the expense of the nitrogen. 

In the combustion of all explosive ma- 
terials, great heat is generated, and the 
force of the explosion is dependent upon the 
volume of gases and the high temperature 
to which they are raised. 

The smokeless powder used in the United 
States is made by dissolving a special kind 
of guncotton or nitrocellulose in ether and 
alcohol, just sufficient of the solvent being 
used to gelatinate the nitrocellulose, which is 
then stuffed through a forming die into rods. 
The rods are cut into sections of about three 

[3] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

diameters long. The die, the invention of 
the writer, contains seven mandrels ar- 
ranged in such wise that when the material 
is forced through the die the bar is multi- 
perforated with seven holes at equal dis- 
tances apart. The grains or rods of smoke- 
less powder are then dried for use. 

When burned in a cannon, all of the sur- 
faces of the material are practically instantly- 
ignited by a small flash charge of black rifle 
powder used for the purpose of setting fire to 
the charge of smokeless powder. The combus- 
tion in the perforations causes them to be- 
come larger and larger until the grain is all 
consumed. This form of grain tends better 
to maintain the pressure behind the projec- 
tile in its flight through the gun, and enables 
the use of larger charges of powder with 
lower pressures than could otherwise be em- 
ployed. In fact, it would be impossible to 
use a smokeless powder made of pure nitro- 
cellulose in big guns without the multi-per- 
forations. 

In certain European countries where the 
multi-perforated powder has not been 
adopted, nitroglycerin is employed, com- 
bined with the nitrocellulose, which causes 

[4] 



FACTS ABOUT EXPLOSIVES 

the material to burn through a greater thick- 
ness in a given time. Thus a smokeless 
powder may be made without the multi-per- 
forations, but smokeless powders contain- 
ing nitroglycerin erode the guns and destroy 
them very quickly, while guns employing 
pure nitrocellulose smokeless powders last 
much longer. 

When one of our big army or navy cannon 
is fired, the time which elapses from the 
instant of complete ignition of the powder 
charge to the instant that the projectile leaves 
the muzzle of the gun is about the fiftieth or 
the sixtieth of a second, and in that time the 
hard and horn-like smokeless powder ma- 
terial is burned through only about a six- 
teenth of an inch ; hence the rate of combus- 
tion or rate of explosion of smokeless pow- 
der in a cannon is about four inches per sec- 
ond, while it has been ascertained by actual 
experiments that the rate of combustion or 
rate of explosion of dynamite and other high 
explosives is about four miles per second, 
so that the rate of consumption of smoke- 
less powder, as compared to that of a high 
explosive, is as are four inches to four miles. 

As the time required for the projectile to 
[5] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

be thrown from a twelve-inch cannon is only 
about the sixtieth of a second, sixty of these 
huge guns could be placed side by side and 
fired by electricity one after the other, while 
grandfather's clock is making but one tick. 

Our ideas of duration are but relative. 
We have seen that the combustion in a can- 
non, though very rapid to our senses, is ac- 
tually very slow indeed as compared with 
the much more rapid combustion of a high 
explosive; and great as is the speed of the 
detonative wave, yet the speed of the earth 
in its orbit is four times as great. 

If a celestial giant with a huge dynamite 
bomb the size of the earth itself were to ap- 
proach the earth in its flight through space, 
and detonate the bomb immediately behind 
the earth, it would take half an hour for the 
bomb to explode, that is to say, it would take 
half an hour, or thirty minutes, for the ex- 
plosive wave to pass through the eight thou- 
sand miles of its diameter. As the speed of 
the earth in its orbit is four times as great 
as that of the explosive wave, the earth 
would rush away, leaving the bomb about 
thirty thousand miles behind by the time it 
had completely exploded. If the interstellar 
[6] 



FACTS ABOUT EXPLOSIVES 

ether were a high explosive mixture and 
were to be set off by the bomb, the earth 
would pass on clear around the sun, and 
while coming back, about six months later, 
would meet the explosive wave still going. 
It would require nearly a year for such a 
detonative wave to reach our sun from the 
earth. 

We have seen that if the earth were a ball 
of dynamite, it would require half an hour 
to explode. If the sun were a mass of dyna- 
mite it would require about two and a half 
days to explode. 

We frequently hear the theory advanced 
that planets and suns sometimes explode 
from pent-up forces within them, and that 
our earth might possibly blow up. Now, 
the force exerted by a high explosive is de- 
pendent entirely upon the pressure capable 
of being exerted by the gases liberated by 
the explosion. The pressure exerted by the 
most powerful high explosives has been esti- 
mated to be about 500,000 pounds to the 
square inch. Consequently, were the whole 
molten interior of the earth to be replaced 
with dynamite and detonated, the explosion 
that would follow would not lift the earth's 

[7] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

crust. The superincumbent weight of the 
earth's crust is greater than would be the 
pressure exerted by the dynamite. 

If it were possible to throw a projectile 
from the earth to the nearest fixed star, 
Alpha Centauri, it would take about four 
years for the light of the flash to reach that 
star. The sound, if it could travel through 
ether, would reach there about four million 
years later. The projectile, traveling more 
than twice as fast as sound, would reach 
there in about two million years. 

When one of our big twelve-inch cannon is 
fired, the projectile, weighing a thousand 
pounds, has a muzzle energy, stated in me- 
chanical terms, of about 50,000 foot tons, 
that is to say, its energy is equal to 50,000 
tons falling from a height of one foot — 
energy enough to lift two 25,000-ton battle- 
ships to the height of a foot. 

As the projectile weighs half a ton, the 
energy is equal to that which would be de- 
veloped by dropping the projectile from a 
height of more than twenty miles, making 
no account of the resistance of the atmos- 
phere. 

Dropping upon a piece of armorplate too 

[8] 



FACTS ABOUT EXPLOSIVES 

hard and thick for the projectile to pene- 
trate, the heat developed would be sufficient 
to melt 750 pounds of cast iron. 

When one of these projectiles is fired from 
the gun directly against twelve-inch armor- 
plate, which the projectile is capable of pene- 
trating, the hard-tempered steel plate in 
front of the projectile is fuzed or rendered 
plastic from the heat generated by the 
energy of the impact, and is forced like wax 
from the path of the projectile. 

There are many popular errors regarding 
the action of explosive materials. One of 
the most notable is the opinion that the ac- 
tion of dynamite is downward, and that if a 
body of high explosive be detonated on the 
surface of the earth the main effect is down- 
ward. 

The exact opposite is the truth. When a 
mass of explosive is detonated, it is con- 
verted practically instantly into a ball of in- 
candescent gases and vapors under very 
high pressure. When confined the gases act 
to disrupt their container. 

When a large steel projectile is charged 
with a high explosive, like picric acid, and 
the explosive detonated, the walls of the pro- 

[9] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

jectile are not only broken but they are also 
torn, twisted and shredded, and so quick is 
the action that the inner surface of the 
metal is compressed and densified against 
the outer metal. 

For this reason it is easy to tell from the 
character of the fragments of a projectile 
whether or not a high explosive or an explo- 
sive of inferior power was employed, that is 
to say, whether or not the explosion was of 
high order or of low order. 

There is one false belief about the action 
of high explosives that has been about the 
hardest of any to kill, and the cost of killing 
it has been very expensive. Furthermore, it 
possesses more lives than the proverbial 
nine-lived cat. This belief is that five hun- 
dred pounds or so of dynamite exploded 
upon a warship or upon coast fortifications 
would destroy ship or fortifications, and 
that a few of such large bombs of dyna- 
mite dropped in a city would lay the city in 
ruins. 

Upon the advent of the aeroplane and the 

dirigible balloon, it was confidently believed 

that the aerial bomb would quickly become 

the most destructive implement of warfare. 

[10] 



FACTS ABOUT EXPLOSIVES 

It was prophesied that should war come be- 
tween England and Germany, London would 
soon be reduced to a heap of ruins by bombs 
dropped from the German Zeppelins. 

Several years before the European War 
broke out, I predicted that Zeppelin bombs 
would not and could not by any possibility 
work very wide destruction, and events have 
since vindicated my prediction. I pointed 
out the fact that should a hundred Zeppelins 
visit the city of London, once a day, for a 
year, returning to their base without mis- 
hap, and each Zeppelin succeed in destroy- 
ing two buildings, the destruction would just 
about keep up with the growth of that city, 
for they build in London sixty thousand 
houses a year. 

We all remember the destructive powers 
that were predicted for the fifteen-inch 
Zalinski pneumatic dynamite guns that were 
mounted at Sandy Hook and at San Fran- 
cisco at enormous Government expense. 
These guns were capable of throwing with 
compressed air about six hundred pounds of 
nitrogelatin to a distance of from a mile- 
and-a-half to two miles. It was popularly 
believed that one of these bombs striking 

[11] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

upon a huge armorclad warship would ut- 
terly destroy it. 

Also two of these guns were mounted in 
a sort of cruiser called the Vesuvius, Dur- 
ing the Spanish War the Vesuvius was taken 
down to Cuba, and in one action several of 
the huge bombs were thrown upon the earth- 
works and fortifications of the Spanish. 
They succeeded merely in mussing up the 
green, grassy effect. They did no material 
damage, for the reason that the action of the 
explosive was nearly all upward into the air. 

When the pneumatic dynamite gun was 
promulgated, it was popularly believed that 
all high explosives were exceedingly sensi- 
tive, and that it was necessary to get them 
out of the gun very gently if they were to 
be thrown from ordnance. 

The writer was the first to dispel this 
folly, through the invention of Maximite, a 
high explosive which will stand not only the 
shock of being fired from heavy guns at high 
velocities, but which will also, without ex- 
ploding, stand the far greater shock of pene- 
trating the heaviest armorplate — armor- 
plate as heavy as the projectile will stand 
to pass through without breaking up. 
[12] 



FACTS ABOUT EXPLOSIVES 

"While I was working upon Maximite and 
trying to get the Government to adopt it, 
Congress appropriated the money for build- 
ing an eighteen-inch gun for testing a shell 
invented by Louis Gathmann, which was 
intended to destroy battleships by exploding 
the shell on the outside of their heavy armor- 
plate, it being believed that if five hundred 
pounds of guneotton were to be fired against 
the side of an armored ship and exploded, 
the whole side of the ship would be blown 
in and the vessel destroyed. 

The gun employed by Gathmann was es- 
sentially the same type of gun as that pre- 
viously designed by me, and explained in a 
lecture by me before the Eoyal United Serv- 
ice Institution of Great Britain in 1897, and 
illustrated in a book of mine published the 
same year by Eyre & Spottiswoode, Brit- 
ish Government printers, except that the 
bore of my gun, which was of the same 
weight as that of the Gathmann gun, was 
greater. With my gun, however, I proposed 
to throw armor-piercing projectiles, or pro- 
jectiles capable of penetrating an object 
struck and exploding inside of it. I did not 
believe that a quantity of high explosive that 

[13] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

could be thrown in a shell and exploded on 
the outside of a heavily armored ship would 
destroy it, but believed it necessary that the 
explosive should penetrate and explode in- 
side the ship, and within earthworks and 
fortifications in order to destroy them. 

Maximite was adopted by the United 
States Army in 1901. It was during that 
same year that the experiments were con- 
ducted with the Gathmann shell at Sandy 
Hook. I attended those experiments. 

Two Kruppized armorplates, each eleven- 
and-a-half inches thick, sixteen feet long, 
and seven-and-a-half feet wide, and each 
weighing 47,000 pounds, were set up, one 
as a target for the Gathmann shell and 
the other as a target for the regular 
United States twelve-inch Army Eifle. Each 
of the plates was backed by supports to rep- 
resent the same strength as though mounted 
on a battleship. 

The Gathmann shell weighed about eigh- 
teen hundred pounds, and carried about ^ve 
hundred pounds of guncotton, while the 
Government twelve-inch shell weighed a 
thousand pounds and carried only twenty- 
three pounds of Maximite. The Gathmann 
[14] 



FACTS ABOUT EXPLOSIVES 

shell had a soft nose, which collapsed on the 
plate at the instant before the explosion of 
the shell, so that the guncotton might ex- 
plode fairly against the side of the plate. 

At the first shot of the Gathmann gun, 
the projectile struck the plate squarely and 
exploded, but the only effect upon the plate 
was to leave a great yellow smudge on its 
face. The plate was neither cracked nor 
pushed back. Several more shots of the 
Gathmann gun were fired, and although, 
tinder the heavy pummeling, the plate was 
pushed back and broken through, up and 
down, it was not otherwise injured. 

Then the Government twelve-inch gun was 
fired at the other plate. The first shell con- 
tained nineteen pounds of high explosive, 
and it passed through the plate, leaving a 
clean round hole, and exploded behind the 
plate without breaking it. The next shell 
contained twenty-three pounds of Maximite, 
and the fuze was timed to go off a little 
quicker. This shell exploded in the plate 
when about two-thirds through, with the re- 
sult that a hole was blown in the plate as 
big as a barrel, and the plate shattered into 
fragments. 

[15] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

One would think that these tests would 
suffice forever to seal the doom of the Grath- 
mann type of shell. Nevertheless, it matters 
not what Army and Navy officers may learn 
by experience, or know without experience. 
Congress does not know and does not under- 
stand, and depends far more upon think-so 
than upon experience. The result is that 
Government officers are often compelled, as 
in the case of the Zalinski dynamite gun and 
the G-athmann shell, to waste large sums of 
money while they know very well before- 
hand exactly what the results will be, and 
that the tests will prove the devices to be ab- 
ject failures. Even after the failure of the 
Grathmann shell, another shell of almost 
identical conception and purpose was made 
and tested under a Congressional appropria- 
tion, to be relegated to the scrap-heap of 
failures. 

It is very fortunate that things happen to 
be as they are in the cosmos and that the 
action of a high explosive when exploding 
against a massive body is to rebound from 
that body on the line of least resistance. It 
is for this reason that more damage is not 
done by great explosions. 

[16]! 



FACTS ABOUT EXPLOSIVES 

One of the biggest explosions in the his- 
tory of gunpowder manufacture occurred at 
Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, on the 9th of 
March, 1911, when it was estimated that a 
thousand tons of black blasting powder blew 
up. Glass was broken over a very wide area. 
Some glass was broken in Chicago, about 
fifty miles distant. 

But neither the walls nor the foundations 
of buildings were greatly disturbed even but 
a few miles from the explosion. In the vil- 
lage of Pleasant Prairie, at a distance of but 
two miles, although the buildings were very 
much damaged the inhabitants continued to 
occupy them. 

Early in the morning of July 30, 1916, a 
very large quantity, certainly several hun- 
dred tons, of high explosive materials blew 
up in New York Harbor, not far from Ellis 
Island. A large quantity of shrapnel am- 
munition and other ammunition went up in 
the blast, their fragments raining all over 
the surrounding water. There was but very 
little loss of life, and the actual material 
damage to buildings in Jersey City, Man- 
hattan and Brooklyn was astonishingly 
small, except the loss from broken glass. 
[17] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

Why is it, then, that so much glass is 
broken and at such long distances, while the 
foundations and walls of buildings suffer but 
little injury! Let me explain. When a 
quantity of high explosive detonates, a wave 
of atmospheric compression is sent outward 
in all directions by the explosion. It is, in 
fact, a huge sound wave, and moves exactly 
at the speed of sound — about eleven hundred 
feet per second. Of course, buildings or 
other structures or objects near enough to 
the explosion to be struck by the expanding 
gases themselves, or by the atmosphere im- 
mediately propelled forward by them like a 
projectile, may be destroyed, but the area 
over which this action occurs is so circum- 
scribed that no great damage is apt to re- 
sult at distances beyond a few hundred feet. 

However, the great sound wave may travel 
to a distance of many miles. Consequently, 
as a result of the explosion just referred to, 
about a million dollars' worth of glass was 
broken in New York City alone. One would 
naturally suppose that the fragments of 
window glass broken in this manner would 
fall inside a building, but they do not. Al- 
most always they fall outside into the street. 
[18] 



FACTS ABOUT EXPLOSIVES 

The reason for this is that the wave of com- 
pression, striking a pane of glass, forces it 
inward nigh to the breaking point, and then 
as the wave of compression moves on, fol- 
lowed by a partial vacuum, the glass, spring- 
ing outward to fill the void, breaks, and falls 
into the street. 

An interesting incident of this great ex- 
plosion was staged at Ellis Island. There 
were a goodly number of immigrants on the 
Island at the time, congregated from the four 
corners of the earth, some of whom had come 
to America to seek their fortunes in this 
land of freedom - from - everything - except- 
freedom, but many had come to find quiet 
and security from war's alarums. Few of 
them, indeed, had ever felt the comfort of 
an overcoat, but many had dreamed of some 
happy day when they would sport a verita- 
ble fur-lined overcoat. 

When the great explosion came it sounded 
like the crack of doom, and most of the im- 
migrants believed it to be the real thing and 
proceeded with agitated precipitation to get 
their souls ready for rapid transit over the 
Great Divide. 

All eyes naturally were averted to the 
[19] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

celestial concave, aglare with the great con- 
flagration, when suddenly, to the confound- 
ing amaze of all, a large flock of fur-lined 
overcoats began tumbling down out of the 
heavens all over the Island. It is true they 
were lined merely with sheep's fur, but even 
such a garment is as much the pride of the 
Northern European peasant as is the broad, 
glad-colored sombrero the pride of the Mexi- 
can peon. 

As the Government statute books and 
rules and regulations governing immigrants 
contain no provision for the disposal of such 
species of manna as heaven-sent overcoats, 
the immigrants were the beneficiaries. 

Great as are such explosions as that at 
Pleasant Prairie and that in New York Har- 
bor, they are but little things indeed com- 
pared with the explosions that sometimes ac- 
company volcanic eruptions. Mother Earth 
is the greatest of all explosive manufac- 
turers. 

Water seeping down into the earth's crust 
and trapped in large quantities in the neigh- 
borhood of volcanoes sometimes becomes 
heated to high incandescence — ^heated until 
it is no longer water or steam, but mingled 
[20] 



FACTS ABOUT EXPLOSIVES 

oxygen and hydrogen, far above the tempera- 
ture of their dissociation — under a pressure 
so great that they occupy a space no larger 
than the original water ; consequently the en- 
trapped waters exert a pressure as great as 
the strongest dynamite. 

The most notable volcanic explosion that 
ever occurred in historic time was when that 
old extinct volcano, Krakatoa, in the Straits 
of Sunda, that had been sleeping for thou- 
sands of years, was literally blown into the 
sky by the pressure of the pent-up gases be- 
neath it. 

This great eruption occurred in 1883. 
More than sixty thousand persons were 
killed. The captain of a tramp steamer, 
who happened to be passing in the vicinity 
of Krakatoa at a distance of some miles, a 
short time before the explosion occurred, 
saw a very strange disturbance in the sea in 
the direction of the old mountain. Taking 
his glass he saw a perfect Niagara of water 
pouring into an enormous fissure that had 
opened in the earth. He was struck with con- 
sternation and rightly imagining that some- 
thing very serious was likely soon to hap- 
pen, he put on all steam to escape, and luck- 
[21] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

ily he had reached a point which enabled him 
to survive the effects of the awful blast when 
it came. 

The vast mass of water which had tum- 
bled into the bowels of the earth was im- 
mediately trapped by the closing of the great 
fissure down which it had poured. The 
water was quickly converted by the intense 
heat into a veritable high explosive, with the 
result that the massive mountain was liter- 
ally blown bodily skyward, and fell in huge 
fragments into the surrounding sea. The 
shock was so great that it was felt clear 
through the earth, and an immense tidal 
wave was set going which encircled the 
earth. The opposing portions of the great 
wave, meeting in the lower Atlantic, flowed 
up even to the coast of France. An at- 
mospheric wave passed around the earth 
three times. It is estimated that the amount 
of volcanic mud that was discharged from 
the mountain during the eruption was more 
than the muddy Mississippi discharges into 
the Gulf of Mexico in two hundred years. 

There was so much impalpably fine vol- 
canic dust blown into the upper atmos- 
phere that it did not entirely settle out of 
[22] 



FACTS ABOUT EXPLOSIVES 

the air for more than two years, which period 
was noted for its beautiful glowing sunsets, 
due to the illumination of the fine dust sus- 
pended in the upper air. 

As the ax is to the woodsman, so are high 
explosives to the engineer. With dynamite 
he hews down the hills, fills the valleys 
and tunnels the mountain-range to make a 
straight and even way for the locomotive. 
He cuts canals through the width of the land, 
uniting rivers and seas. 

Always in the van of civilization, there is 
heard the churn of the rock-drill and the 
echoing crash and roar of the dynamite 
blast. 

Also it is the huge high explosive shell 
that makes way for the march of modern 
armies, and high explosive mines and tor- 
pedoes are the terror of the underseas. 

All forms of dynamite are high explosives, 
and all high explosives may fairly be called 
dynamite. 

Smokeless gunpowder is actually but a 
modified form of high explosive. It is dyna- 
mite that has been chained and tamed by the 
chemist's cunning, so that it will burn with- 
out detonation, and thus permit the utiliza- 
[23] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

tion of its awful energy to hurl shot and shell 
from war^s great guns. 

Thus it is that dynamite in its varied 
forms deserves the high place with steam 
and electricity as one of the great triumvirs 
that have been the architects of the modern 
world. 



[24] 



THE FOKGOTTEN BIT OF FULMINATE 

IN experimenting with high explosives 
and in their manufacture, a little absent- 
mindedness, a very slight lack of exact 
caution, a seemingly insignificant inadvert- 
ence for a moment, may cost one a limb or 
his life. The incident that cost me my left 
hand is a case in point. 

On the day preceding that accident, I had 
had a gold cap put on a tooth. In conse- 
quence, the tooth ached and kept me awake 
the greater part of the night. Next morning 
I rose early and went down to my factory at 
Maxim, New Jersey. In order to test the 
dryness of some fulminate compound I took 
a little piece of it, about the size of an Eng- 
lish penny, broke off a small particle, placed 
it on a stand outside the laboratory and, 
lighting a match, touched it off. 

Owing to my loss of sleep the night before, 

my mind was not so alert as usual, and I 

forgot to lay aside the remaining piece of 

fulminate compound, but, instead, held it in 

[25] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

my left hand. A spark from the ignited 
piece entered my left hand between my 
fingers, igniting the piece there, with the 
result that my hand was blown off to 
the wrist, and the next thing I saw was the 
bare end of the wristbone. My face and 
clothes were bespattered with flesh and filled 
with slivers of bone. . . . The following 
day, my thumb was found on the top of a 
building a couple of hundred feet away, with 
a sinew attached to it, which had been pulled 
out from the elbow. 

A tourniquet was immediately tightened 
around my wrist to prevent the flow of blood, 
and I and two of my assistants walked half 
a mile down to the railroad, where we tried 
to stop an upgoing train with a red flag. But 
it ran the flag down and went on, the 
engineer thinking, perhaps, from our wild 
gesticulations that we were highwaymen. 

We then walked another half-mile to a 
farmhouse, where a horse and wagon were 
procured. Thence I was driven to Farming- 
dale, four and a half miles distant, where I 
had to wait two hours for the next train to 
New York. 

The only physician in the town was an in- 
[26] 



TEE FORGOTTEN BIT OF FULMINATE 

valid, ill with tuberculosis. I called on him 
while waiting, and condoled with him, as he 
was much worse off than was I. 

On arrival in New York, I was taken in a 
carriage to the elevated station at the Brook- 
lyn Bridge. On reaching my station at 
Eighty-fourth Street, I walked four blocks, 
and then up four flights of stairs to my 
apartments on Eighty-second Street, where 
the surgeon was awaiting me. It was now 
evening, and the accident had occurred at 
half -past ten o'clock in the morning. That 
was a pretty hard day! 

As I had no electric lights in the apart- 
ments, only gas, the surgeon declared that it 
would be dangerous to administer ether, and 
that he must, therefore, chloroform me. He 
added that there was no danger in using 
chloroform, if the patient had a strong heart. 
Thereupon I asked him to examine my heart, 
since, if there should be the least danger of 
my dying under the influence of the anes- 
thetic, I wanted to make my will. 

** Heart!" exclaimed the surgeon, with 
emphasis. ^^A man who has gone through 
what you have gone through today hasn't 
any heart!'* 

[271 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

The next day I dictated letters to answer 
my correspondence as usual. The young 
woman stenographer, who took my dictation, 
remarked, with a sardonic smile: 

*^You, too, have now become a shorthand 
writer. ' ' 

The grim jest appealed to my sense of 
humor. 

On the third day I was genuinely ill and 
had no wish to do business. Within ten 
days, however, I was out again, attending to 
my affairs. 



[28] 



HELL SWAZEY BEEAKS UP THE 
DANCE 

A BOUT the first use of nitroglycerin in 
/-\ the United States as a blasting agent 
on a large scale was in the construc- 
tion of the Hoosac Tunnel in Massachusetts, 
on the Boston and Albany Eailroad. 

So many accidents had occurred where the 
use of nitroglycerin had been attempted, 
that engineers and contractors were afraid 
to employ it. Nobel, however, had discov- 
ered that when nitroglycerin was absorbed 
in infusorial earth, it was rendered much 
less sensitive. This material he called 
dynamite. 

A chemist by the name of Professor Mow- 
bray believed that the main trouble with 
nitroglycerin had been that it was not suffi- 
ciently purified in its manufacture. He in- 
duced the builders of the Hoosac Tunnel to 
try his product. He built a laboratory on 
the side of Hoosac Mountain, over the vil- 
[29] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

lage of North Adams, where he produced 
the stuff. 

He put it up in tin cans, which held about 
a quart. For transportation these were 
carefully packed with cotton flannel between 
them. 

The method of using the dynamite was to 
pour it into holes drilled in the rock, insert- 
ing an exploder cap and fuze in the usual 
manner. At that time it was popularly sup- 
posed that if nitroglycerin or dynamite were 
allowed to freeze, it became very highly sen- 
sitive and would explode on the slightest jar. 
Stories were prevalent that the sound of a 
fiddle string would explode nitroglycerin 
when frozen. 

One day there came an urgent call from 
the east end of the Tunnel for more nitro- 
glycerin. Professor Mowbray had in his 
employ a care-free and fear-free fellow by 
the name of Helton Swazey. When Swazey 
was sober, he was the soul of good nature, 
but when drunk, which was very frequently, 
he was as savage as a hungry cougar. This 
peculiarity earned Helton Swazey the nick- 
name of Hell Swazey. 

It was a very cold winter day when the 
[30] 



SWAZEY BREAKS UP THE DANCh 

call came, and Professor Mowbray, learning 
that Hell Swazey was going over the moun- 
tain that very evening to attend a dance, 
asked him if he would not take over the 
nitroglycerin with him. A hot-water bag 
was placed with the nitroglycerin and all was 
wrapped in a heavy blanket to protect it 
from Jack Frost. The shipment was placed 
in the back of Swazey 's sleigh. 

Hell Swazey 's best girl, whom he took with 
him, did not know the nature of the cargo. 

The nine-mile ride over the mountain was 
very cold. Swazey kept himself warm by 
imbibitions from a flask of liquid caloric, and 
to keep the young woman warm he took 
the blanket and the hot-water bag from the 
nitroglycerin for her comfort, leaving the 
explosive to the mercy of the below-zero 
weather. 

When Swazey arrived at the dance-hall to 
join in the frolic, he was in so ugly and med- 
dlesome a mood that he was promptly put 
out of the hall, followed by his woman com- 
panion. Swazey was mad all through. He 
went to the sleigh, and taking an armful of 
the cans of nitroglycerin, returned to the 
hall, and opening the door proceeded to hurl 
[31] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

them with all his force at the merry- 
makers. 

One can struck upon the stove and glanced 
across the room. Cans smashed against 
wall, ceiling and floor. 

As the frightened occupants fled through 
the windows, they did as Mark Twain did 
when he saw the ghost — they did not stop 
to raise the windows, but they took the win- 
dows with them. In the language of Mark, 
they did not need the windows, but it was 
handier to take them than it was to leave 
them, and so they took them. 

When Hell Swazey turned up for duty the 
next morning. Professor Mowbray had al- 
ready heard of the escapade, but he was 
filled with marveling why the nitroglycerin 
had not exploded, particularly as it must 
have been frozen very hard. 

When Swazey entered the presence of the 
Professor, he expected immediately to be 
discharged. He was meek and crestfallen 
enough, and began to excuse himself and to 
apologize for his behavior. 

To his amazement, Professor Mowbray 
appeared to be very much interested and 
pleased, tapping his forehead with his finger, 
[32] 



SWAZEZ BREAKS UP THE DANCE 

smiling and nodding, and muttering to him- 
self, *^Good; good; splendid!'' He interro- 
gated Swazey carefully, to be assured that 
the nitroglycerin was frozen hard, that it 
had been thrown hard, that it had struck 
hard, and that it had not exploded. 

That very night there was mailed at the 
North Adams Post Office an application for 
a patent for freezing nitroglycerin to make 
it safe to handle. 



[33] 



THE POET'S UPLIFT 

EXPLOSIVE factories are veritable 
schools of efficiency. All work is done 
under the eye of the most vigilant cau- 
tion, and the penalty for negligence is so ex- 
pensive in the destruction of life and prop- 
erty that science, which is knowledge, and 
proceeds from sure premises to safe conclu- 
sions, is the sole guide. It does not do to 
follow a guess. The dynamite factory is no 
place for that class of persons who believe 
themselves to be favorites of Providence or 
of Almighty God, for dynamite plays no fa- 
vorites. 

There is probably no other class of per- 
sons so little guided by science as are the 
poets. They pride themselves on the fact 
that they ignore science. They claim that 
poetry is a sort of transcendental stuff, star- 
dusted from the gods' abode upon only a 
few persons fortunate enough to be born 
with a divine afflatus, which puts them into 
a fine frenzy — a condition of body and mind 
[34] 



THE POET'S UPLIFT 

partaking somewhat of the ecstaticism of 
the Whirling Dervish, the spiritual clair- 
voyant and the soothsayer — a holy hysteria 
— a delirium-tremendous effervescence of 
over-soul — in which condition they are able 
actually to commandeer the co-operation of 
the Deity. 

To heighten the humbug, the poets claim, 
to quote, that ^'poetry knows no law/' that 
^^it is above and beyond all law''; and 
consequently that it is ''the antithesis of 
science," veritably 'Hhe despair of science," 
''defying all attempts at analysis and under- 
standing," and that, being an inspired prod- 
uct, "poetry is the greatest achievement of 
the human mind." 

The poets would have us believe that all of 
the great inventors and discoverers, scien- 
tists and philosophers, have been far in- 
ferior to the poets. The poets would have 
us believe that all the triumphs of chemistry 
and mechanics have been small compared 
with the triumphs of poetry. The poets 
would have us believe that the invention of 
the phonograph, of the telephone, of wire- 
less telegraphy, the discovery of radium and 
the X-ray, the discovery of gravitation, are 
[35] 



^DYNAMITE STORIES 

not equal to such triumplis of the poets as 
*' Aurora Leigh/' ^'Curfew Must Not Eing 
Tonight,'' and ''The May Queen." 

The poets would have us believe that the 
discovery of the spectroscope, which tells 
the composition of the stars so far away that 
the light by which we see them now left its 
source before the building of Babylon and 
the founding of the Egyptian Pyramids, is a 
less wonderful product of the human mind 
than is Shelley's ''Skylark." 

It is perfectly safe for the poets to live 
and move and have their being in error, but 
it does not do even for a poet, when work- 
ing with explosive materials, to eliminate 
scientific procedure, for in that case he is 
likely to get an uplift that will sprinkle the 
feet of the angels with his filamented frag- 
ments. 

This very thing actually once happened in 
the Pennsylvania oil region when the poet 
laureate of his community was blessed by the 
discovery of petroleum on his otherwise 
worthless farm. One well sunk by the oil 
company gushed a large quantity of both oil 
and natural gas. The royalty received by 
the poet was immense. One day he con- 
[36] 



TEE POET'S UPLIFT 

ceived the idea of climbing to the top of the 
oil-derrick and writing a poem to vent his 
pent-up fervor. 

He had engaged the services of a photog- 
rapher to catch his beatitudinations. The 
sun was just descending the horizon, and the 
poet and the top of the derrick were still 
aglow in the radiance of sunset, while der- 
rick and poet were enveloped in an explosive 
mixture of gas and air a hundred feet in 
diameter. The photographer had said, 
^^Eeady, look pleasant, please." This was 
the moment of inspiration. The poet loosed 
his divine afflatus and set his fine frenzy to 
doing things. The following science-con- 
founding doggerel is what he effused: — 

Poetry is a divine art 
And I am a poet to the heart, 
And am writing these lovely lines 
Right where the setting sun shines, 
Just at the close of a beautiful day. 
Under the milk-like Milky Way, 
But which cannot he seen just yet though 
Because of the sunset's brighter glow. 
Yet I know it is there, and poesy may 
Raise me nearer the Milky Way, 
[37] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

. . . And it did, for at this point the poet 
struck a match to light a cigarette, and the 
explosive mixture of natural gas and air 
about him fired first. 

When last seen the poet was headed for 
the Milky Way. 



[38] 



HO.W BENDER LOWERED THE PRICE 
OF DYNAMITE 

ONCE, when entering my storage maga- 
zine at Maxim, New Jersey, in which 
were several carloads of dynamite, 
along with 37,000 pounds of nitrogelatin, 
made to fill an order from the Brazilian Gov- 
ernment, I saw John Bender, one of my la- 
boring men, calmly but emphatically open- 
ing a case of dynamite with cold chisel and 
hammer. With some epithetitious phraseol- 
ogy, I dismissed him. 

It was not long after this incident, when 
the Boniface of the inn at Farmingdale, a 
nearby village, called upon me to buy some 
dynamite. He told me that he had employed 
John Bender to blow the stumps out of a 
meadow lot. I related to him my experience 
with that reckless person, and tried to im- 
press him with the fact that Bender was 
temperamentally so constituted as to court 
death, not only for himself but for others 
about him, when handling dynamite. 
[39] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

But Boniface was unconvinced. He 
wanted Bender to do the work and he wanted 
the dynamite to do it with. Bender, he said, 
had assured him that he was a great expert 
in the handling of dynamite — that he could 
so place a charge under a stump that he 
could always tell beforehand the direction 
the stump would take, and about how far it 
would go under the impulse of the blast. 
Therefore, it was only a question of the price 
of the dynamite. 

**Well,'' said I, ^*the dynamite you want 
is sixteen cents a pound, but I'll bet you the 
dynamite against the price of it that John 
Bender kills himself with it, so that if he does 
not succeed in blowing himself up and kill- 
ing himself with the dynamite, you can have 
it for nothing. On the other hand, if he does 
blow himself up, you must pay for the 
dynamite. ' ' 

A few days later, there was some hitch in 
Bender's exceptional luck. A particularly 
refractory old stump had resisted a couple 
of Bender's dynamic attacks. The failure to 
dislodge the stump Bender took as a per- 
sonal affront, because it reflected upon his 
skill as a stump-blaster. 

[40] 



HOW BENDER LOWERED THE PRICE 

^^Next time/' said he, * ^ something is going 
to happen.'' 

He placed about twenty pounds of dyna- 
mite under the deep-rooted veteran, touched 
it off, and several things happened in very 
quick succession. The huge stump let go its 
hold on earth, and proceeded to hunt Ben- 
der. It was a level race, but the stump won. 
Striking Bender on the north quarter, it 
stove in four ribs, dislocated a few joints, 
and damaged him in several other respects 
and particulars. 

Boniface came to settle for the dynamite. 

*^ Sixteen cents a pound," I said. *^ Ben- 
der hasn't a chance in a hundred. Wait till 
the doctors are through with him." 

*^What do you say to a compromise," sug- 
gested Boniface, *^of eight cents a pound? 
For really," quoth he, **I do not believe that 
Bender is more than half dead." 

And the account was settled on that basis. 



[41] 



FOOLHAEDY KRUGEB 

ONE of the most dare-devil men I ever 
had in my employ was a young fel- 
low by the name of Joe Kruger. He 
was a very hard worker, and that won par- 
don for his many indiscretions. 

I sent him one day to a neighboring ex- 
plosives works to get a special kind of gnn- 
cotton made there, and told him to have it 
sent by freight in a wet state. Instead, how- 
ever, he filled about fifty pounds into a big 
burlap bag, in a perfectly dry state, and 
took it on the train with him and into the 
smoking-car, placing it on the seat beside 
him. He struck a match, lighted a cigar, 
and smoked throughout the entire journey. 
Had the least spark of match or cigar fallen 
upon the bag, the guncotton would have 
gone off with a tremendous flash and, al- 
though it would not have detonated, it would 
have burned him terribly, as well as any 
persons sitting near, and would have blown 
out all of the windows in the car. 
[42] 



FOOLHARDY KRUGER 

At another time, in order to test the in- 
sensitiveness of a certain high explosive, a 
quantity of it was charged into a four-inch 
iron pipe, and the pipe hung against a tree 
as a target to ascertain whether or not the 
bullet would penetrate the high explosive 
without exploding it. 

Kruger and I fired several shots with a 
Springfield rifle from cover at long range 
without hitting the cylinder of explosive. I 
was then called away and told Kruger to con- 
tinue firing until he hit the mark. As soon 
as I left him, he advanced with the gun to 
within a few rods of the tree. His first shot 
penetrated the cylinder, exploding it with 
terrific violence, blowing the tree, which was 
about eight inches in diameter, clean off, 
while the fragments of metal flew about his 
head like hailstones. But none happened to 
hit him. 

The following is the sort of adventure that 
is likely to happen to anyone under similar 
circumstances and has doubtless happened 
before and since. 

Kruger had a dog which was well trained 
to fetch anything that his master threw for 
[43] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

him. One day Kruger took some sticks of 
dynamite and went to a neighboring stream 
with the intention of dynamiting some fish. 
He attached fuze and exploder to a stick of 
the explosive, and threw it toward the 
stream, but, missing his aim, the dynamite 
landed on a rock. 

The faithful dog, thinking that the stick 
had been thrown for him to bring, ran and 
returned with it to his master in great glee, 
with the fuze sizzing nearer and nearer to 
the explosive. Kruger ran in horror, the 
dog after him, deeming it great sport. The 
dog being the better runner, danced about his 
master. Finding it impossible to escape by 
running, Kruger climbed a tree with all the 
alacrity he could muster, and had just 
reached a vantage of safety when the dyna- 
mite exploded, and the dog — well, the dog 
was holding the stick in his mouth when it 
went off. 



[44] 



DISCHARGING PAT 

A WORKS foreman of mine who had 
been employed as assistant superin- 
tendent in another dynamite factory 
told me the following story: 

He one day intercepted an Irish laborer 
who was taking a barrel, which had been 
used for settling nitroglycerin, down to the 
soda dry-house, with the intention of filling 
it with hot nitrate of soda from the drying- 
pans. The foreman scolded Pat roundly, 
and told him that, should he do such a reck- 
less thing again, he would be instantly dis- 
charged. The foreman then went to the su- 
perintendent's office and reported the matter. 

In the meantime, Patrick, utterly ignoring 
the injunction, simply waited for the fore- 
man to disappear, then proceeded to the dry- 
house with the barrel and began to fill it with 
the hot nitrate of soda. 

Over in the superintendent's office the 
foreman had just completed his narration of 
Pat's carelessness, when there was a thun- 
[45] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

derous report and a crash of glass, and 
Pat's booted foot landed on the office floor 
between them. 

The superintendent dryly remarked, ' ^ Evi- 
dently, Pat is already discharged!'' 



[46] 



LINES TO A LADY 

SOME years ago, when I was conducting 
experiments with detonators for my 
safety delay-action fuze, which was 
adopted by the United States Navy in 1908 
as the service detonating fuze for high-ex- 
plosive projectiles, I received instructions 
that a parcel of fulminate detonators, made 
at the torpedo station, had been received and 
were being held for me at Fort Lafayette, 
and I was told to go to the Brooklyn Navy 
Yard, whence I would be taken in a tug to 
the Fort for them. 

After having procured the package, I con- 
cluded that it would be much more expe- 
ditious for me to take a trolley car home than 
to return by the tug. On entering the car 
and seating myself, I placed the package be- 
side me on the seat, keeping my eye con- 
stantly upon it. It was, by the way, perfect- 
ly safe to carry if subject to merely or- 
dinary handling, but it would not do to jump 
on it or to kick it about much, for, in that 
[47] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

case, there might be some energetic re- 
sults. 

No sooner had I comfortably seated myself 
in the car than a huge, determined, militant- 
looking woman entered, brushing a few 
small men aside. Seeing all the seats occu- 
pied except the space where the package was, 
she turned and hurled herself backward and 
downward. 

Her movements were so quick that I had 
barely time to throw my left arm firmly 
under her, and, although I am unusually 
strong, I had all I could do to support her 
enormous bulk. When she felt my arm be- 
neath her, protecting the package, she was 
all the more indignant and determined to 
crush the package in order to teach me a les- 
son, and she glared upon me fiercely. I 
finally succeeded, by throwing my shoulder 
against her, in toppling her sufficiently to re- 
move the package with my right hand, and 
then I let her down upon the seat. 

I seldom wax poetical, and never permit 
myself to write verses to ladies when I am 
not sure that they will be gratefully re- 
ceived. But, in this case, I side-stepped a lit- 
tle from my usual course, and, taking my 
[48] 



LINES TO A LADY. 

note-book from my pocket, wrote the follow- 
ing lines, which I folded up nicely, and when 
I arrived at my street, I handed the paper 
to Her Militancy: 

Bear Madam, Vm an anarchist. 
That package was a bomb. 

I'm on my way 

Someone to slay, 
And this is really true — 
I didn't want to waste that bomb 
On just the likes of you. 



[49] 



HE SEPAEATED 

THE freezing point of dynamite is about 
eight degrees F. higher than that of 
water. Once frozen, it remains con- 
gealed at temperatures considerably above 
the freezing point. When solidly frozen, it 
can be detonated only with much difficulty, 
and even then only with great loss of explo- 
sive force. Consequently, when conducting 
blasting operations in cold weather, it is 
necessary to thaw frozen dynamite before 
using it. The process is neither dangerous 
nor difficult if conducted with ordinary pre- 
cautions, but it may be made full of peril by 
carelessness or ignorance. 

A friend of mine named Eoynor, when 
gold-hunting in Alaska, had as a partner a 
venerable prospector whose only known 
name was Andy. Andy was the dynamiter 
of the combination, as well as chief cook and 
dish-washer. 

The old man used to utilize the oven of the 
cooking stove for thawing his dynamite. 
[50] 



HE SEPARATED 

Occasionally, lie would forget that the dyna- 
mite was there until it was heated to the 
danger point. These little inadvertencies at 
last strained the nerves of Eoynor beyond 
the elastic limit. He remonstrated to his 
aged partner with all the epithetitious ses- 
quipedalian terminology of which he was 
capable, but nothing in the way of language 
or dynamite had any terrors for the old 
man. 

^^Andy," said Eoynor, finally, *4f you are 
not more careful with that dynamite, we are 
going to separate, and we are going to sepa- 
rate the very next time you put any dyna- 
mite in the oven.'' 

The following evening, as Eoynor was re- 
turning from his day's work, and when nigh 
the shack where his partner was cooking, he 
saw the shack instantly convert itself into 
a blinding flash, which solidified into numer- 
ous scattered debris that flew by him and 
fell round him in abundance. 

When he recovered from the stunning 
shock of the explosion and dazedly looked 
about him, he saw many fragmentary evi- 
dences of the repetition of the prospector's 
carelessness. 

[51] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

*'Well, Andy/' he sadly remarked, '*I 
told you we should separate the next time 
you did it. We have separated all right — 
particularly you." 



[52] 



THE WELL-DIGGER'S CASUALTIES 

AT my laboratory near Lake Hopatcong, 
one of the natives, who had made a 
' reputation as a well-digger, and claimed 
to be able to descend through more rock in 
a day than could any other living man, 
thought that his strenuous habitude would 
adapt him to the manufacture of explosive 
materials, and with this in view he applied 
to me for a position. 

My foreman gave him a job in which his 
duty was to assist with the rolling of motor- 
ite. The foreman gave the fellow explicit 
instructions about the care necessary to keep 
his fingers from getting in between the roll- 
ers, as it would not only prove uncomfort- 
able for him were he to shed a finger or a 
hand, but it would also spoil the motorite by 
mixing it with his lacerations. ... Almost 
at once, the end of one finger went. 

Immediately, the well-digger was dis- 
charged, for his own sake and for the sake 
of motorite. 

[53], 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

The man next took a contract to dig a well 
for one of the cottagers on the Lake. It was 
in the early winter. The weather was cold, 
and his dynamite froze very hard. He 
placed it in a bucket of boiling hot water, 
which thawed the outer stratum of the frozen 
stick, overheating it and rendering it very 
sensitive, while the core remained frozen 
solid. 

He was too active and impatient a work- 
man to wait long for a stick of dynamite to 
thaw, so he took the partly thawed stick, 
seized a hatchet, and proceeded to chop off 
one end of it. 

The blow of the ax upon the soft, over- 
heated, highly sensitive portion, compress- 
ing it against the frozen interior, which 
served as an anvil, exploded the stick. 
There was one finger and the thumb left on 
his right hand which held the ax, while his 
left hand, which had held the dynamite, and 
his whole left arm, were blown away. 

When he looked about him with the one 
astonished eye that was left, he seemed 
pained that his old friend dynamite had 
gone back on him in that way. 

[54] 



THE EIVAL EDITOES 

THE following story was related to me 
by a professional liar, and yet I have 
suspicions that it is not true in every 
detail; but I feel sure that some variant of 
it has been true more than once, with the ex- 
ception of the aerial incident. 

A certain inventor had invented one of the 
very often-invented high explosive com- 
pounds of chlorate of potash, sulphur, char- 
coal, paraffin wax, etc., thinking that he had 
made a great discovery. 

Now it happens that there is so much er- 
raticism about high explosive mixtures with 
chlorate of potash as a base that the path- 
way of invention of such compounds has 
been strewn with the wreckage of the hopes 
and anatomy of their inventors. 

The inventor had enlisted the financial 
support of a promoter, and the promoter 
was endeavoring to enlist financial support 
for himself, and to that end had invited sev- 
eral men of means, with two rival newspaper 
[55] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

editors of the place, to witness a demonstra- 
tion of the explosive at the inventor 's labora- 
tory, which was a two-story, light frame 
structure. 

The promoter was letting himself be inter- 
viewed by the two editors and other news- 
paper reporters on the upper floor, while the 
inventor was making a demonstration with 
some of the stuff on the lower floor, the 
prospective investors warily watching the 
proceedings from a respectful distance. 

The inventor had about half a barrel of 
the stuff in a tub. He first took a portion 
of it and pounded it on an anvil to show that 
it would not explode from shock. Next he 
took a handful of it and threw it into the 
fire under the boiler, to show that it would 
not explode from mere ignition. He then 
took a hot iron, which he had brought to a 
white heat in a forge, and thrust it into the 
half barrel of the infernal mixture, to show 
that it simply could not be exploded except 
with a very powerful exploder or detonator. 

But the mixture happened, on that occa- 
sion, to differ somewhat from the inventor 
with respect to the sequence of eventuations 
: — and exploded. 

[56] 



TEE RIVAL EDITORS 

The building went up, and the promoter, 
the two editors and the reporters on the 
upper floor accompanied the building. 

Two of the newspaper men were great 
rivals. One of them was the editor of the 
Clarion and the other the editor of the Echo. 
It so happened that the Clarion had better 
facilities for getting telegraphic news than 
the Echo, and accordingly the Clarion was 
usually able to post its news in advance of 
the Echo, and the editor of the Clarion used 
often to chaff his rival with the remark, 
*^It's no use to put up your poster now, for 
my poster of the same news is just coming 
down.'^ He called the Echo the echo of the 
Clarion. 

When the explosion occurred, the editor 
of the Clarion, being more directly over the 
explosive than was the editor of the Echo, 
went up farther and faster, and on his re- 
turn met the editor of the Echo still going 
up, and called out to him, ^^ Behind as usual! 
All of the other fellows are coming down." 



1571 



THE PASSING OF ^^JEOPAEDY'' 

WE once had a servant girl whom we 
nicknamed * * Jeopardy, ' ^ because she 
could not be prevented from pour- 
ing kerosene directly from the can upon a 
lighted fire. 

One day, Jeopardy left us very suddenly, 
and she never came back. We were sorry 
she left, as Jeopardy was a good girl. It 
developed that she had chanced to find a 
fifty-pound case of dynamite sticks in the 
wood-shed, which she had been using to start 
the fire in the kitchen stove. 

Sometimes, dynamite will work all right 
for such a purpose, but it is notional stuff 
and can, not be depended upon merely to 
burn. It was during one of these intervals of 
independability that Jeopardy went. 



[58 J 



THE INVOLUNTARY ATTACK 

SOON after the invention of the Maxim 
automatic machine gun, I took the 
American agency for the introduction 
of the weapon to the United States Govern- 
ment. Among the tests that were conducted 
with the gun at Sandy Hook was one known 
as the sand test, sand being sifted into the 
mechanism of the gun, which was then loaded 
and fired. The gun went through the test 
perfectly. 

The commanding officer, however, had not 
himself been present at the regular tests 
and arrived upon the scene only after they 
had been concluded. This particular officer 
was a dyspeptic, and was at times very un- 
pleasant and domineering. On this occasion, 
he was particularly so. When told by the 
officers immediately in charge of the tests 
that they had been concluded, he peremptor- 
ily commanded that the gun should be loaded 
and fired again. One of the under-officers 
demurred, stating that a sand test was a 

[59] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

very hard one on the gun, and that it would 
be unfair to subject it to unnecessary hard- 
ship of that character. That officer was im- 
mediately sat upon very hard. 

The gun was loaded and made ready, 
pointing out to sea, as usual. At this mo- 
ment, a schooner was seen rapidly coming 
into range. The commanding officer, how- 
ever, said that he wanted to see only a few 
rounds fired, and that there would be plenty 
of time to fire them before the schooner 
came into the zone of danger; and he im- 
mediately gave the command: *^Fire." 

My assistant, who was operating the gun, 
instantly obeyed. After the discharge of 
perhaps twenty-five rounds came the com- 
mand: ''Cease firing!" 

But the gun kept right on. Then, the com- 
mand came several times in loud shouts, but 
the gun did not hear. The rage of the com- 
manding officer was at white heat, but it did 
no good. The gun kept right on firing. 

There were three hundred and thirty- 
three rounds in the belt, the weapon had 
been rigidly clamped to a set direction, and 
my assistant, being a little bit rattled at the 
loud shouts of the commanding officer, did 
[60] 



THE INVOLUNTARY ATTACK 

not think to nnclamp it, and turn it out of 
range of the schooner. 

Soon, a stream of bullets, flying at the 
rate of six hundred a minute, were ricochet- 
ing all about the schooner, and there was 
wild excitement and waving of hands on 
board — all to no purpose, until the last car- 
tridge had been exploded. 

The trigger had been pulled by the sand 
and held pulled. It was, consequently, im- 
possible to stop the gun from firing, until 
the belt of cartridges was exhausted. 

I felt glad. The subordinate oJBficers also 
looked gratified. 



[61]; 



HOIST WITH HIS OWN PETAED 

LIQUID nitroglycerin is still used to tor- 
i pedo the oil-wells when they get old, 
in order to give them a new lease 
of life. 

There was one teamster in the old days 
who had become notorious as a hauler of the 
dangerous explosive. The law does not per- 
mit the shipment of the liquid by freight or 
by express, and for that reason this teamster 
had plenty to do in hauling nitroglycerin for 
long distances. He was a great smoker and 
his old pipe was always alight, though he 
might be riding on a ton of nitroglycerin 
with a few kegs of black gunpowder chinked 
into the load. 

One day he was carrying, on runners, about 
two tons of nitroglycerin and a few odd kegs 
of gunpowder, when something happened. 
There had been a fall of several inches of 
light snow the evening before, and the scene 
of the eventuation was an open field which 
he was crossing. 

[62] 



HOIST WITH HIS OWN PETARD 

There was an enormous crater in the 
ground ; the light snow around the crater was 
besprinkled with a few shreds of horse and 
harness and a sliver or two of sled, hut not 
a trace of the driver was ever found. 



[63] 



THE FOEGOTTEN PEECAUTION 

I ONCE hired board and apartments at 
the house of a Frenchwoman, who took 
in only a few select gentlemen boarders. 
Perhaps I may have been justly esteemed the 
star boarder, inasmuch as I paid the highest 
price, and, too, in addition to a sleeping 
room and a library, I hired another large 
room to serve me as a laboratory. Although 
my main laboratory was located at my fac- 
tory, still I was in the habit of conducting 
a few experiments in a small way when not 
at the factory. 

I had given my landlady particular in- 
structions about not handling the various 
things in my laboratory. I strictly enjoined 
her not to touch anything under any circum- 
stances — ^I would keep the place in order my- 
self. Nevertheless, she could not be pre- 
vented from entering the laboratory to dust 
and tidy it up a bit, and she generally 
knocked over a thing or two in the process. 

One day, I brought home a pint glass jar 
1 64 ] 



THE FORGOTTEN PRECAUTION 

of pure nitroglycerin, setting it up out of 
reach of the little three-year-old girl, who 
often used the laboratory as a playground, 
in spite of my protestations. I called my 
landlady's attention to the fact that this bot- 
tle contained nitroglycerin, and I explained 
its dangerous character unless it were left 
undisturbed. 

I told her that, if she found it out of the 
question to let the bottle alone, and should, 
in dusting, succeed in knocking it over and 
spilling its contents upon the table where it 
stood or upon the floor, and should wipe up 
the oily liquid with a rag, not to put the rag 
in the stove, for, if she did, she would blow 
the roof of the house off, and project herself 
into the empyrean, and through it and out 
at the other side. 

She actually remembered this injunction 
for more than three days, but, on the fourth 
day, on my return home, the little three-year- 
old met me as I came in, and said : 

^^ Mamma very sick. Cure Mamma." 

**Mamma" was lying upon a sofa, pale as 
a ghost, and breathing heavily. When I 
asked her what the matter was, she an- 
swered, *'0h, I am so sick!'' 
[65] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

I began to be thoroughly frightened, and 
wormed out of her the fact that she had a 
terrible nitroglycerin headache. It came out 
that she had been dusting and tidying the 
laboratory that day, and had inadvertently 
knocked over the bottle of nitroglycerin. 
Fortunately, it did not explode as it fell, the 
contents being merely spilled upon the table 
and floor. 

She took an old towel and soaked the liquid 
up with it. She then rolled up the towel in 
a tight, snug, compact wad, and started to- 
ward the kitchen to put the wad in the cook- 
stove and burn it up, when, just as she ar- 
rived at the stove, she felt a dizziness in the 
head, and a strange sort of sinking sensa- 
tion in the stomach. The top of her head 
began to buzz and pound. 

Then, she saw light. It dawned upon her, 
like the inspiring flash that came upon Saul, 
that this was nitroglycerin, and she recalled 
what I had told her about the effect it would 
have upon her if she handled it, and my di- 
rection that, if she should spill the stuff and 
then wipe it up, she must not burn the rag. 



[66] 



THE FATAL HAT 

OUT in the Pennsylvania oil regions in 
the early days, while nitroglycerin in 
the liquid state was being used ex- 
perimentally as a blasting agent, some boys 
found in a creek an old felt hat, which had 
been used as a filter for nitroglycerin. 

One of the boys accidentally discovered 
that when laid upon a stone and the edge of 
the hat hit with a hammer, it would crack, 
so they took it to a blacksmith ^s shop, where 
they could have some fun by hammering it 
on an anvil. 

At the first blow the old hat exploded. 
Two of the boys were killed outright, and 
two more were badly injured. 

The blacksmith at the time of the accident, 
happened to be standing outdoors, which 
thereafter constituted his blacksmith shop 
until he could rebuild. 



[67] 



A DROP TOO MUCH 

PROFESSOR MOWBRAY, who made 
the nitroglycerin for the Hoosac Tun- 
nel and afterward served the American 
Xylonite Company many years as consulting 
chemist, conceived the idea that he could 
make a very powerful smokeless gunpowder 
by the use of nitroglycerin merely absorbed 
by fibrous guncotton and rolled into pellets. 
He had at the time a young assistant chemist 
at work for him, who has now become a man 
of much wealth and prominence in New 
York. 

The assistant prepared some of the pel- 
lets under Mowbray's directions, loaded 
them into a rifle under wad and ball, and 
fired at a target made of several layers of 
pine boards. But the pellets did not seem 
to give the bullet the required penetration. 
Mowbray suggested remedying this defect 
by adding a little more nitroglycerin, which 
was done. The young chemist demurred a 
little. Still, he did as instructed — ^loaded 
[68] 



'A DROP TOO MUCH 

and fired the piece again, with but little bet- 
ter results. This time, however, the breech 
mechanism stuck, and was opened with diffi- 
culty. 

Mowbray said that there was but one thing 
to do, and that was to add a few more drops 
of nitroglycerin. It occurred to the young 
chemist that this sort of gunpowder came 
pretty near being dynamite, and he declined 
to fire the piece the next time, and was 
deaf to all entreaties of the Professor. As 
a compromise, the gun was rigged up on a 
rest, pointing at the target ; a string was at- 
tached to the trigger, which the assistant, 
standing behind a barricade, pulled. 

This time, there was considerable penetra- 
tion of the target, and the walls of the build- 
ing where the test took place were pene- 
trated in many places, not with the bullet, 
but with the fragments of the exploded 
weapon. 

Mowbray, hearing the report, ran out and 
ventured the suggestion that he guessed he 
must have got in a drop too much of nitro- 
glycerin. 



1 69 ]i 



A CLOSE CALL 

I HAD one very close call while conduct- 
ing a sand test of the Maxim gun at 
Annapolis, where the Naval Proving 
Grounds were formerly located. The gun 
had passed through all of the regular tests 
satisfactorily, and it was then suggested to 
try if sand enough could be put into the 
mechanism box to block it and prevent its 
firing. 

The gun fired perhaps fifty rounds before 
it stopped. Then it stuck, and my assistant 
worked at the belt and lever, attempting to 
start it again. I told him to put down the 
safe so that the gun could not fire, which he 
did. I was then about to step around the 
gun in front, which I confess was a very 
careless thing to do, when it began firing 
again. I was already so close to the muz- 
zle that my clothes were cut by the bullets 
and burned by the gunpowder. 

The trigger had been pulled, and held 
[70] 



A CLOSE CALL 

pulled, by the sand, so that the safe did not 
prevent it from firing. 

It is pretty good practice to keep away 
from the business end of a loaded gun. 



[71] 



A PICKANINNY'S TREASUEE TROVE 

ONCE at Annapolis, while we were fir- 
ing a six-pounder semi-automatic gun 
in a speed test, we had succeeded in 
firing forty-two aimed shots in a minute into 
a huge earth butt, which, owing to recent 
rains, was merely a heap of mud. 

The day following, a negro boy, about 
fourteen years old, found one of the pro- 
jectiles, which had penetrated the butt, and 
glancing, came out at the top without explod- 
ing. This he brought up to where my assist- 
ant was doing some work on the gun, and 
showed what he had found. 

My assistant shouted at him, **Look out! 
That's loaded, and if you drop it, it might 
go off." 

Frightened, the negro immediately dropped 
the projectile upon the hard cement pave- 
ment, and, as it struck point down, it did go 
off, and took off one of his legs ; and a frag- 
ment of the shell came dangerously close to 
the head of my assistant. 
[72] 



NOT TO BE BUNCOED 

THE great Du Pont Powder Company 
had in its employ at one time a faith- 
ful, patient and lucky fellow, an 
Italian, who worked constantly, with not a 
day off except Sundays, for twenty-one years 
in the corning mill, breaking black gunpow- 
der press cake into grains. During that 
period the corning mill had blown up seven 
times, once every three years, but each time 
Giovanni had happened, by the merest 
chance, to be outside for a few seconds to 
get a drink of water or on some other brief 
errand. Twice he had had his clothes nearly 
ripped off him, and his face and hands 
burned, such had been his proximity on these 
occasions to the crater of fire as the mill 
went up, and once he had been rendered un- 
conscious by the shock. 

Finally, at the end of twenty-one years of 
service, having put aside a snug little for- 
tune, sufficient for the remainder of his life 
[73] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

in sunny Italy, lie packed up his belongings 
and turned his face toward his old home. 
Arriving in New York, his ticket purchased, 
he hied himself to a noted Italian hostelry, to 
await the coming of the joyous morrow when 
he should actually be on the big steamer, 
headed for home. 

Giovanni had no bad habits, and the bunco 
man failed to lure him. He took no stock 
in the dapper, polished-mannered compatriot 
just recently from his home place, who was 
acquainted with all the folks. His cash was 
sewed into his clothes, and those clothes 
would not come off until he reached his des- 
tination. 

When he was shown up into his room at 
night and left alone with his thoughts, a 
placard upon the wall above the gas-burner 
attracted his attention. It read: ** Don't 
blow out the gas,'' and under this injunction 
was the statement that gas burned after ten 
o'clock would be charged extra. 

Giovanni was indignant. Here he was at 
last caught between the horns of a dilemma. 
This, to his mind, was downright thievery. 
He would cut the Gordian knot. He would 
disobey the injunction. He would not pay 
[74] 



NOT TO BE BUNCOED 

for gas burned overtime perforce; and he 
blew it out. ... 

An old sea-captain who had for forty 
years traveled on every sea, who had weath- 
ered a thousand gales, and survived a hun- 
dred shipwrecks, on his return from his final 
voyage, in making his landing on his home 
shore, slipped from the dock into the water 
and under the skiff, and was drowned. 

Such is the irony of chance! 



[75] 



\ 



SIR FREDERICK'S BONFIRE 

SIR FREDERICK ABEL, who was the 
originator of the modern process of 
making high-grade guncotton and of 
compressing it into dense cakes for use, told 
me the following story: 

At one time, Sir Frederick had about five 
tons of dry guncotton, which was not of 
sufficient purity to stand the Government 
tests. He had, on previous occasions, fre- 
quently demonstrated how compressed gun- 
cotton, though dry, would quietly burn away 
without exploding when ignited, so he now 
fancied that his five tons would make a 
capital bonfire. With this idea of entertain- 
ment in possession of him, he invited a party 
of friends to witness the unique conflagra- 
tion. 

The friends were dominated more by the 
spirit of aloofness than was Sir Frederick 
himself, and they kept at a respectful dis- 
tance, while Sir Frederick advanced toward 
the pile of explosive, and threw a lighted 
[76] 



SIR FREDERICK'S BONFIRE 

torch upon it. Then he retreated a short 
distance to avoid the intense heat, for he ex- 
pected to see the whole pile burn away. 

It started by merely burning; but, as I 
have already said about dynamite, it is no- 
tional stuff. So, on this occasion, the gun- 
cotton took a notion to explode after it got 
fairly on fire, which did not take very long. 
The whole mass detonated with terrific vio- 
lence, and, even before Sir Frederick had re- 
treated as far as he expected to go, he was 
knocked senseless by the concussion, and 
nearly every shred of clothing was blown 
from his body. . . . Although considerably 
bruised and lacerated, he recovered after 
several months. 

He had learned a useful lesson: that a 
small quantity of compressed dry guncotton 
can be very well depended upon to burn 
quietly away without detonating, but, when 
a large mass of it is ignited, the greater heat 
of combustion and the greater pressure 
generated in expelling the larger quantity of 
the products of combustion, is almost sure 
to produce detonation. 

The fact that a small quantity of an explo- 
sive material will burn away quietly with- 
[77] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

out exploding has often led persons to think 
that a large quantity would burn in the 
same manner. 

At one time, the British Government had 
on hand at Woolwich Arsenal about a hun- 
dred tons of cordite that had begun to show 
signs of decomposition, and it was decided 
to burn it. The entire quantity was taken 
out into an open meadow, at what was sup- 
posed to be a very safe distance from the 
city limits. A train was laid to the pile and 
set on fire. 

For the same reason that the five tons of 
Sir Frederick AbePs guncotton detonated, 
this huge heap of cordite also detonated. 
Almost instantly after it was ignited, it ex- 
ploded with most awful violence, and with 
very disastrous results. A number of build- 
ings in the near vicinity were leveled to the 
ground. A few persons were killed and 
many more injured. 



[78] 



THE IRREVEEENT NATIVE 

A FTER I had sold out my interests at 
/-\ Maxim, the place was taken over by a 
dynamite-manufacturing company. As 
there was left in one of the magazines a con- 
siderable quantity of dynamite when the 
property changed hands, the new concern, 
not choosing to sell it as their own manufac- 
ture, proceeded to utilize it as fertilizer upon 
a field of potatoes. 

One of the natives, with his team and 
helper, was engaged to do this work. They 
had been instructed to use great care in 
opening the cases, but they still held their 
own opinions about the care necessary, which 
were based largely upon the contempt that 
is born of familiarity, and, having arrived 
upon the potato-patch with a good, big load 
of dynamite, they began to knock the cases 
open in any old way. 

There were no surviving witnesses, not 
even the horses. 

[79] 



AT FOLLY'S MEECY 

A FTEE I had sold tlie works at Maxim 

/-\ and had invented motorite, I needed a 

place in which to make the material, 

and hired a branch of the works there for 

that purpose. 

It was winter. My wife had accompanied 
me as a precautionary measure. She was 
sitting in the laboratory to keep warm, near 
a big barrel stove charged with bituminous 
coal. 

On entering the laboratory for something, 
my wife asked me what was in those two tin 
pails sitting near the stove. She said that 
she had a suspicion it might be nitroglycerin, 
and she informed me that one of my men 
had just been in, stirring the fire, and that 
the sparks flew out in all directions, some of 
them lighting in the buckets, to bp quenched 
in the very thin film of water floating on top 
of the oily liquid. 

** Horrors!'' I said. **It is nitrogly- 
cerin!" 

[80] 



AT FOLLY/8 MERCZ 

I called the man who had placed it there, 
and told him to take it away. As it was 
necessary to keep the material from freezing, 
he took it into the boiler-house near by. A 
little later, on going into the boiler-honse, I 
saw one of the men stirring the fire, while 
the other was standing with his coat-tails 
outstretched in either hand, forming a shield 
to keep the sparks from flying into the nitro- 
glycerin. 

It is practically impossible to make the 
ordinary man appreciate the necessity of 
care in the safe handling of explosives, and 
the life of the careful man is always endan- 
gered by the actions of the careless one. 



[81] 



THE WATCHMAN'S DOUBLE VISION 

MY successors in the use of the dyna- 
mite plant at Maxim had in their em- 
ploy a day-watchman, an all-round 
combination useful and useless man, his use- 
fulness and uselessness alternating with the 
alternation of his sobriety and inebriety. 

One morning, after a night out, he pro- 
ceeded to build the fire in the laboratory 
stove. To start up the kindling wood, he 
had been in the habit of lighting a handful 
of shavings, and then pouring on a little 
kerosene from a tomato can, which he kept 
upon a near-by shelf. 

During that night, someone — ^possibly one 
of the laboratory operatives — ^had placed a 
similar can, filled with nitroglycerin, upon 
the same shelf, to keep it from freezing. 

In periods of convalescence from his vari- 
ous stages of intoxication, the watchman 
had before seen two cans upon that shelf or 
shelves, but he knew that one of them was 
[82] 



THE WATCHMAN'S DOUBLE VISION 

real, and the other an hallucination. Couldn't 
fool him that way! 

Thinking that the hallucination would 
naturally be the lighter of the two cans, he 
took the one containing the nitroglycerin, 
and proceeded to pour it upon the fire. 

There was so little of him left together 
after the explosion that, like Captain Cas- 
tagnette, he died of surprise at seeing him- 
self so dissipated. 



[831 



THE ZEALOUS FOOL 

ON one occasion, at my laboratory near 
the shores of Lake Hopatcong, I was 
conducting some experiments to test 
the efficiency of the safety chamber of a de- 
tonating fuze for exploding projectiles 
charged with Maximite. The huge loaded 
shell armed with a fuze was placed in a pit 
and fixed so as to be set off by electricity 
from a distance. 

To prevent any possibility of a circuit 
being formed to explode the detonator while 
making the connections at the pit, I went 
into the machine-shop, and opened the 
switch at the other end of the wires where 
they were connected with the battery. Not 
only did I take this precaution, but I dis- 
connected also the wires themselves, in order 
to make assurance doubly sure. 

Eeturning to the pit to connect up, my as- 
sistant, my wife and my father-in-law accom- 
panied me. My assistant descended into the 
[84] 



TEE ZEALOUS FOOL 

pit, while we stood over him, looking on. 
The instant he brought the wires in contact, 
the detonator went off. We looked at one 
another in amazement. It takes time to get 
thoroughly scared; but, as soon as we real- 
ized the full danger through which we had 
passed, we were numb with fright. Even 
now, when I think of it, I have a creepy feel- 
ing. 

"We had made half a dozen tests before 
this, and all of the shells had exploded ex- 
cept one. This was the second in which the 
safety-chamber had proved effectual. Had 
it failed this time, and had the Maximite 
charge exploded in the huge shell, we should 
all have been blown to ribbons. 

I rushed back to the machine-shop, where 
I found that a certain employee — one of 
those careful, painstaking souls who are al- 
ways attending voluntarily to the odds and 
ends of work left undone by others, had dis- 
covered the wires detached from the switch. 
With no memory of the rule that the switch 
should always be left open, he forthwith con- 
nected the wires, and then, to make his 
culpable industry complete, he closed the 
switch, thus making the electric connection 
[85] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

with the loaded shell ; and, doubtless, he was 
comforted by a sense of duty well done. His 
duties in my services certainly were done, 
for they ended right then and there. 



[86] 



SOME LIVELY COTTON WASTE 

I ONCE had an Italian laborer as man-of- 
all-work, who was rather a good-looking 
fellow. An exquisite mustache and a 
wealth of curly hair were sources of great 
pride and joy to him. One day he was en- 
gaged in burning up some rubbish, and to 
start a fire, took what he supposed to be a 
bunch of dry cotton waste, but which was in 
fact guncotton. Holding in one hand the 
wad of guncotton the size of his head, he ap- 
plied a match to it. There was a quick, 
bright flash, and hair and mustache had dis- 
appeared. He did not mind the burn so 
much, but his anxiety about his appearance 
in the eyes of his sweetheart was pathetic. 



[871 



SAVING TIME 

WHEN I had completed at my works, 
Maxim, New Jersey, a certain 
frame building of generous propor- 
tions, of wMch I was quite proud, and in 
which I had installed various processes and 
apparatus for making smokeless gunpowder, 
I told one of my assistants to have a gauge 
put on a large bell-drier that stood in a cor- 
ner, which was employed for the time being 
to extract the moisture from about forty 
pounds of guncotton. He gave instructions 
to a machinist to do the job, telling him to 
remove the guncotton first. 

As it was necessary for the machinist 
merely to bore a hole through the bell-drier 
and screw in the connecting pipe, he thought 
it a useless expenditure of time and effort to 
remove the guncotton. After he had bored 
the hole nearly through, he took a punch and 
hammer to knock out the remaining burr. 
A spark ignited the guncotton, and that bell- 
drier went right up through the roof and 
[88] 



SAVING TIME 

turned a somersault, striking about a hun- 
dred feet away. The walls of the building 
on the end where the explosion occurred 
were thrown outward, and the roof came 
down. 

My assistant and another young man were 
in the building with the machinist at the 
time. Although dazed by the shock, they im- 
mediately rushed to the rescue of the poor 
fellow, who lay prostrate under a pile of 
burning debris. Not much could be done for 
the unfortunate, and he died soon after- 
ward. 

This instance is a type of many that re- 
sult from inadequate precaution by workmen 
in the manufacture of explosives. 



[89] 



THE BEOKEN SCALE 

ONE of the closest calls that I ever had 
in my life occurred in my laboratory 
at Maxim, New Jersey, in the early 
nineties. 

Two of my assistants and myself were 
weighing out small batches of fulminate of 
mercury from a ten-pound jar. There were 
on the bench as many as half-a-dozen small 
squares of glass, each with its little pile of 
fulminate upon it. There was also a five- 
pound bottle of nitroglycerin standing on 
the bench. A little way removed, and under 
the bench, was a fifty-pound can of gelatin 
dynamite. 

We were proceeding very cautiously, when 
all at once the scoop toppled, and an iron 
weight fell, striking within an eighth of an 
inch of one of the pieces of glass on which 
was fulminate of mercury. After a second 
of suspense, we stared at one another in 
amazement, wondering whether or not we 
were still in the land of the living. 

[90] 



THE BROKEN SCALE 

An investigation into the cause of the ac- 
cident revealed the fact that one of the young 
men employed in the laboratory had broken 
off an arm of the scales — one of the supports 
of the scoop — ^the day before, and, with 
criminal reticence, had made absolutely no 
mention of the fact to anyone. Had that 
weight fallen upon the fulminate, it must 
have dealt death to all of us. 



[91] 



THE SINGULAR GOOD FORTUNE OF A 
GENTLE ENGLISHMAN 

IT so happened that during a tour of in- 
spection seven of us were together, go- 
ing over the works. On entering the 
guncotton dry-house, I noticed a strong odor 
of nitric acid. 

' ' Out of here, quick ! ' ' I cried. * ' The place 
is going to blow up ! " 

There were perhaps a hundred pounds of 
dry guncotton in the room at the time, 
spread out in pans. As was afterward 
learned, the foreman, being in a hurry for 
the guncotton, had turned live steam into the 
pipes instead of circulating hot water 
through them as instructed. 

We were barely out of the room when the 
guncotton burned with a flash, wrecking the 
building and setting fire to the fragments. I 
was just congratulating myself that no one 
had been injured by the explosion, when it 
was discovered that one of the party, an 
Englishman, the even tenor of whose way 
[92] 



FORTUNE OF GENTLE ENGLISHMAN 

nothing could accelerate or disturb, and who 
feared nothing, had not quite made up his 
mind in time to get out of the room before 
the flash came. On seeing him emerge at 
last from the zone of destruction, I was hor- 
ror-struck, for apparently every hair had 
been burned from his head and face, while 
shreds of skin hung from his hands and 
cheeks and brow. 

Nevertheless, the Englishman's usual 
phlegmatic manner was wholly unruffled, and 
he spoke in his conventional voice, untinged 
with emotion: 

'^Mr. Maxim, it isn't often that one has 
an opportunity under such circumstances of 
witnessing exactly what occurs." 



[93j: 



THE MATCH AT THE PEEP-HOLE 

A CERTAIN patented device is used for 
the recovery of solvents in the manu- 
facture of smokeless gunpowder. An 
acquaintance of mine conceived the idea that 
it would be an excellent thing to employ this 
same device for the recovery of alcohol used 
in the manufacture of felt hats. He con- 
ducted experiments successfully, having the 
hats placed in a chamber through which hot 
air was circulated, and from which it was 
afterwards conveyed to a refrigerating com- 
partment to condense out the alcohol, then 
reheated and returned to the drying cham- 
ber. 

Ultimately, this ingenious person so won 
the confidence of a company of hat manufac- 
turers that they determined to build the ap- 
paratus at their factory, and to give it a 
thorough trial to test its practicability. 
Things progressed very well indeed, until 
there came a day when a leak was discov- 
ered in some part of the apparatus, and a 
[94], 



TEE MATCH AT THE PEEP-HOLE 

plumber was called in to make the necessary- 
repairs. This artisan's first act was to open 
a peep-hole, light a match, and peer into the 
drying chamber. 

There was much instantaneity in the ac- 
tivities that followed. Fourteen persons 
were killed outright, including the plumber 
and his assistant, and the building was com- 
pletely wrecked. 



[95] 



THE FLASK OF LIQUOE 

SOME years ago, in Austria, a worker in 
one of the mines found a flask nearly 
full of a liquor that he took to be 
whisky. Delighted with this treasure trove, 
he raised the flask to his lips, and gulped 
down a portion of the contents. Another 
workman, standing by, snatched the flask, 
and, in his turn, quaffed the liquor greedily. 
That liquid in the flask was nitroglycerin, 
which, taken internally, is one of the most 
virulent of poisons. Both of these workmen 
were stone dead in less time than it has taken 
to tell this story of their fatal folly. 



[96] 



IMPERTINENCE PUNISHED 

DUEING the experiments at Sandy- 
Hook which preceded the adoption of 
Maximite by the United States Gov- 
ernment, a young lieutenant just out of 
West Point was placed in charge of the load- 
ing, although he knew absolutely nothing 
about explosives. He tried hard, however, 
to make up for his deficient knowledge by 
the most exacting, impertinent and foolish 
requirements. 

I rebelled, but was told by the command- 
ing officer that, while he fully appreciated 
the situation, he must, as a matter of duty, 
support his subordinate officer, and he ad- 
vised me to return to my task in looking 
after the loading of the Maximite, under the 
direction of the impudent youngster. This 
I did. 

The lieutenant, now having his own way, 

heated some Maximite very hot and filled a 

projectile with it through the false base plug 

provided for the purpose. There were two 

[97] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

holes in the false base plug, through one of 
which the Maximite was poured into the pro- 
jectile, while the other served as a vent. Be- 
ing uncertain whether or not the projectile 
was filled solidly, the officer took a round 
stick, and rammed it down one of the holes, 
while he looked into the other. The result 
was that his eyes were filled and his face 
covered with the hot liquid Maximite, put- 
ting him out of commission for a week. 

My sympathy for the fellow was quite 
overbalanced by my gratification. 



[98] 



CURIOSITY ^S UPLIFT 

SHOETLY after the Eusso-Japanese 
war, there drifted in upon the Chinese 
shore one of the huge floating mines 
constructed by the Eussians, containing 
about five hundred pounds of guncotton. 
This strange object greatly excited the curi- 
osity of the Chinese, who flocked in large 
numbers to view it. While half a thousand 
of them were crowded in close upon the 
mine, marveling over the mystery of this 
flotsam, one of their number began to investi- 
gate it with a hammef, and, hitting the fuze 
a heavy blow, exploded the mine. 

An American witnessed the event from a 
distance. Wondering what all the excite- 
ment was about, he had started toward the 
crowd with the intention of making an in- 
vestigation on his own account, when, of a 
sudden, there was a flash and shock. The 
horde of Chinamen that had been clustered 
about the mine vanished in a cloud of dust. 
Fragments of heads, arms and legs rocketed 
[99] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

skyward in the form of an inverted cone. 
The head of a Chinaman, severed from the 
trunk, went hurtling through the air, with 
the queue out-streaming behind, like a comet 
coming to perihelion. It passed just over 
the horrified American and struck the 
ground some distance beyond him. 



[100 J 



PEOUD EVEN UNTO DEATH 

A N inventor, who lived in the mosquito 
/A belt of Staten Island, constructed a 
dynamite gun out of a piece of four- 
inch-gas-pipe, and a dynamite bomb out of 
a short section of gas-pipe, capped at both 
ends. The bomb was filled with No. 1 dyna- 
mite. He placed several pads of felt be- 
tween the projectile and the powder charge, 
to lessen the shock upon the bomb. By us- 
ing small charges, he succeeded in firing a 
number of the projectiles safely. Although 
the velocity was low, still it was greater than 
that obtainable with the Zalinski pneumatic 
dynamite gun, which at that time was begin- 
ning to receive some measure of public at- 
tention. 

The inventor was so fortunate as to have 
a **pulP' with the congressman from his 
district, and through this influence he suc- 
ceeded in getting Government permission for 
a test of his piece at Sandy Hook. In the 
meantime he had strengthened the powder 
[101] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

chamber of his gun by driving on several 
steel hoops, in order to use larger charges 
of powder. So confident was he of the 
safety of his system of throwing high ex- 
plosives, that, when the officers at Sandy 
Hook insisted on his retiring with them be- 
hind the bomb-proof during the firing of the 
piece, he balked and insisted that he be per- 
mitted to stand by his gun while firing it, as 
he had done in his previous experiments on 
Staten Island. He was not in the least im- 
pressed with any possibility of danger by 
reason of the fact that he was now using a 
much larger powder charge. 

The officers, however, were obdurate. They 
told him bluntly that he must either stand 
behind the bomb-proof, or his gun would not 
be tested. 

He replied: 

**Very well, if Uncle Sam does not want 
my gun enough to let me test it in my own 
way, then I will sell it to foreign govern- 
ments, and make Uncle Sam feel very sick 
and sorry." 

On his return with his gun to Staten 
Island, he gathered together a party of 
neighbors and some representatives of the 
[102] 



PROUD EVEN UNTO DEATH 

press, to witness the experiments that Uncle 
Sam had missed. When the gun was ready 
to fire, the little knot of spectators frayed 
out, and peeped from cover. There was but 
one shot, which was not a shot, but an ex- 
plosion. 

After waiting for some time for the in- 
ventor to come down and explain, the spec- 
tators went home, disappointed. 



[103] 



THE DOG THAT ATE DYNAMITE 

IN the early nineties I was experimenting 
with a new fulminate compound as a de- 
tonator for fuzes in high explosive pro- 
jectiles. The compound consisted of fulmi- 
nate of mercury with gelatinated guncotton 
and nitroglycerin. 

One of my workmen had a pup of a miscel- 
laneous breed, which would eat anything 
under the sun that he could masticate, and 
when anything was thrown into his mouth 
not too big for him to bolt, he swallowed it 
without the formality of chewing it. 

One day his master gave him about half a 
pound of this fulminate compound. Another 
of the workmen put some metallic sodium 
and dry fulminate into a gelatin capsule, 
stuck this into the end of a quintuple dyna- 
mite cap, wrapped the whole thing in a piece 
of meat, and, calling the dog out into the 
field, made him stand up and ** speak" for 
it. Then he dropped it into the dog's throat 
and it was swallowed at a gulp. 

[ 104 ] 



THE DOG THAT ATE DYNAMITE 

The next instant, the latter workman's 
own dog, which he prized very highly, came 
upon the scene and entered into a very brisk 
wrestling-bout with the dog that had been 
charged. Before he could call him away, 
there was a terrific explosion, and both dogs 
vanished from this vale of tears. 



[105] 



INSECURE SECURITY 

BEFORE the discovery by Nobel that 
the absorption of nitroglycerin by in- 
fusorial earth rendered it much less 
sensitive to shock, numerous attempts were 
made to bring it into general use, in liquid 
form, as a blasting agent, the most notable 
of which was during the digging of the 
Hoosac Tunnel. But, owing to its highly 
sensitive character, fatalities were numer- 
ous; while, furthermore, the necessity for 
perfect purity in order to render nitro- 
glycerin stable — that is to say, to make it 
keep well — was not at first recognized, and 
many disasters were the result from explo- 
sions due to its decomposition. 

The first attempt to introduce nitro- 
glycerin as a blasting agent into the United 
States was made by a young German stu- 
dent. He called the stuff ^^glonoin oil.'' He 
brought over a few hundred pounds in cans 
on the steamer with him, most of which he 
disposed of during his sojourn in the 
[106] 



INSECURE SECURITY, 

States. But his venture was not a financial 
success, and he was obliged, when he re- 
turned to Europe, to leave an unpaid board 
bill at a New York hotel where he had been 
staying. He had left one fifty-pound can of 
glonoin oil, which he let the hotel proprietor 
hold as security, but which, however, later 
developments proved to be insecurity. 

The glonoin oil occupied a place of honor 
in one corner of the barroom for several 
months after the departure of the German 
student. Decomposition having set in, yel- 
low nitrous fumes began to emerge from the 
receptacle, the malevolent odor of which 
was soon noticed by one of the guests, who 
called the landlord's attention to the fact. 
Highly disgusted, the landlord picked up the 
can, walked to the front door, and threw it 
into the middle of the street. The act re- 
sulted in a miniature earthquake, which shat- 
tered the walls on both sides of the street, 
broke window-glass over a square mile, and 
landed the hotel proprietor in the hospital. 



[107] 



THE LOADED CHINAMAN 

DURING the Russo-Japanese war a cer- 
tain officer of the Czar, who was an 
impatient, overbearing person and a 
great martinet, had a Chinese servant whom 
he treated with the utmost harshness for the 
smallest delinquency, or for none at all. One 
of his favorite methods of inflicting punish- 
ment for offenses was to order the China- 
man to leave his presence, and, as the fellow 
went, to give him a hard kick. 

The Chinaman aired his grievances one 
day to a Japanese spy, whom he took to be 
a brother Chinaman. The Jap suggested 
padding the seat of the Chinaman's trousers 
to prevent further contusions, and this was 
done, the padding being furnished by the 
Jap. A rubber hot-water bag was filled with 
absorbent cotton containing all the nitro- 
glycerin it would hold. A small exploding 
device armed with percussion caps was 
placed in the bag so that the nitroglycerin 
would be exploded by any sudden blow, 

[ 108 ]; 



THE LOADED CHINAMAN 

The unfortunate Chinaman was wholly un- 
aware of the nature of the padding. 

At the next meeting of the Eussian with 
his servant, the poor Oriental inadvertently- 
spilled some tea upon the officer's new uni- 
form. Thereupon the enraged master pro- 
ceeded to dismiss the Chinaman from his 
presence in the usual way, but with some- 
what more precipitation. 

One of the officer's legs was blown off, one 
arm was crushed to pulp, four ribs were 
broken, and it was more than a day before 
he was restored to consciousness. When he 
did come to, he found himself a prisoner in 
a Japanese hospital, having been left behind 
by the retreating Eussians. 

As to the Chinaman himself, poor fellow, 
he never knew that he had been loaded. 



[ 109 ] 



LIVINa BOMBS 

AN American reporter, who was with the 
Japanese during the Manchurian cam- 
paign, told me the following story: 

Column after column of Japanese had as- 
saulted a Eussian position, the capture of 
which was exceedingly desirable. Line after 
line of the brave little fellows was swept 
down by the unerring gun-fire of the Eus- 
sians, but each time a few Japanese would 
scale the works, and go over them, only to be 
slain by the Eussians inside. 

There was a lull for a short space, and the 
reporter thought, as doubtless did the Eus- 
sians, that the Japanese had given up the 
task, when, suddenly, a troop of perhaps a 
hundred Japanese rushed forward, in a 
widely scattered line. Onward they flew to- 
ward the Eussian position, and, as they went 
up, there was a blaze of the Eussian rifles, 
and half the Japanese column disappeared 
with a flash and a tremendous report. ... r.. r.i 
They had exploded ! 

[110] 



LIVING BOMBS 

Each of them had been loaded with an in- 
fernal machine, hung across his breast and 
over his shoulders, so that should but a few 
of them reach the enemy's position, they 
could explode themselves and hurl death 
and destruction all around them. 

The Kussians were so astounded, so para- 
lyzed by the spectacle and by the unexpected- 
ness of it, that they ceased firing, while the 
remaining living bombs scaled the ramparts 
and leaped in among their enemies, who in- 
stantly vacated the place, flying like rats 
from a sinking ship. 



[Ill] 



SHIPS THAT PASSED IN THE NIGHT 

DURING the Russo-Japanese conflict, 
more than one of the Czar's war- 
ships disappeared in a night cruise 
without leaving a trace. 

I got the following story somewhat indi- 
rectly, and for that reason cannot vouch for 
its truth. It was told to my informant by a 
Japanese officer while in rather a more com- 
municative mood than is usual for an officer 
of the Mikado. 

This Japanese official at the time com- 
manded a torpedo-boat. In the flotilla of 
which his vessel was one there was a tor- 
pedo-boat that carried neither guns nor tor- 
pedoes, for she had been stripped of all 
armament and every mechanical device not 
absolutely essential to her navigation, in 
order to lighten her. And then she was 
loaded with dynamite to her full capacity. 

The Japanese officer declared that when a 
volunteer crew of half a dozen men was 
called for to navigate her, ten times the re- 
[112] 



SHIPS THAT PASSED IN THE NIGHT 

quired number offered themselves, although 
they well knew that they were going to cer- 
tain death. 

The flotilla was steaming slowly through 
the darkness one night, not far from Port 
Arthur, when there suddenly loomed up 
ahead the huge bulk of a Eussian warship. 
At once the dynamite-laden craft threw her- 
self directly in front of the oncoming levia- 
than. 

Without the pause of an instant, the 
doomed Japanese crew sprung the huge 
mine, when a vast cone of flame shot up, red- 
dening the night, carrying with it high into 
the air, decks, superstructure and guns of 
the warship. The warship's magazines, 
fired simultaneously by the dynamite blast, 
aided the complete demolition. The return- 
ing torrent of guns and wreckage plunged 
into the sea. 

All was over, and it was dark again. 



[113] 



A WILD PROJECTILE 

IN spite of every precaution at Govern- 
ment proving grounds, big projectiles do 
sometimes glance out of the butts or 
heaps of earth into which they are fired, or 
from the face of armorplates against which 
they are directed, and finally land in most 
unexpected quarters. 

One day, while a thir teen-inch gun was be- 
ing tested at Indian Head, a projectile 
glanced out of the butt, mounted high into 
the air, and then came down through the roof 
of a building, where there were engaged a 
number of officers and book-keepers. The 
projectile passed down through the floor, 
close to the desk of one of the officers, and 
buried itself in the earth. 

As the projectile contained no explosive 
charge, the damage was not great, but the 
scare that was thrown into the occupants of 
that room was of considerable magnitude. 



[ 114 ] 



THE BOMB AND THE TRAIN 

ONE of the most anxious moments that 
I ever experienced was during some 
experiments made by me at Maxim in 
throwing aerial torpedoes from a four-inch 
cannon. 

These torpedoes were about four feet in 
length, charged with a very powerful high 
explosive, and armed with a detonating fuze. 
We had successfully fired several of them 
into a sand-butt where they exploded with 
great violence. There were six of them : l&ve 
had been fired and the sixth was loaded into 
the gun, ready to be discharged, when a pas- 
senger train on the Jersey Central Eailroad 
hove in sight, and was passing us about a 
thousand feet away as the gun was fired. 

We had no idea of there being any danger 
to the train, as its position was well away 
from the line of fire, and each of the pre- 
ceding projectiles had behaved so well. But, 
this time, the torpedo glanced from the sand- 
butt, and went after that train. We stood 
[115] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

paralyzed with dread as we saw it pass over 
the train, close to the roof of a car, and 
strike in the swamp just beyond it, perhaps 
a couple of hundred feet behind the track. 
An inverted cone of black earth shot up, fol- 
lowed by a dull sound. 

In imagination we had witnessed a fright- 
ful catastrophe, the wreck of a passenger 
train, with fearful loss of life, and all the 
horror of our own resultant predicament. 
Now that the danger was past, the even 
tenor of our way did take on a new relish. 
What objects we are, after all, of the mercy 
of chance! 



[ 116 ] 



THE MISSING VESSEL 

AT the same place, I was one day on 
/\ the point of beginning an experiment, 
for which I required a small quan- 
tity of dry guncotton. Before going for 
it to the guncotton dry-house, I instituted 
a search for a suitable vessel in which 
to carry it. For some mysterious reason 
I had much difficulty in finding anything 
just adapted to my purpose, and the hunt de- 
layed me a matter of five minutes or more. 
Finally, however, I secured a satisfactory 
vessel, and hurried out of the door in the di- 
rection of the dry-house. ... I had cov- 
ered less than a rod of the distance when the 
dry-house blew up. 

In this instance, surely, a benign Provi- 
dence interfered to save me from destruc- 
tion. 



[117] 



THE DEUNKEN MESSENGER 

SOME years ago, soon after I had built 
my experimental laboratory near Lake 
Hopatcong, a dear old friend came to 
visit me. He had seen hard times in the in- 
terval that had separated ns, and had suf- 
fered from both business reverses and ill 
health since the days when he and I were 
chums. He was plunged in the depths of 
pessimism, while I was optimistic. He was 
in the throes of abject discouragement. 
Though I made him many offers of assist- 
ance in varied forms, none of them seemed 
to cheer him in the least. 

When I knew him in our youth, he had 
been one of the bravest men that ever lived ; 
now, he appeared to have lost all his former 
courage. Often, however, he made the re- 
mark that he was minded to make an end of 
everything, since life offered him nothing 
worth while. I frequently importuned him 
against the folly of contemplating suicide. 
[118] 



THE DRUNKEN MESSENGER 

It came about that one day I was in need 
of fulminate of mercury. As this material 
cannot be taken upon a train or sent by ex- 
press, it was necessary to go for it with 
horse and wagon. Both my assistants and 
myself were just then too busy to be spared 
from the work in hand. So, it occurred to 
me that my old friend would be exactly the 
person to send on the quest. Since he was 
even then engaged in meditating suicide, he 
would not be in the least afraid of fetching 
the stuff for me. Of course, I should not 
have thought of sending him had I believed 
there was any particular danger. Certainly 
there would be none if the material were 
handled properly, and in a wet state. 

My old friend started on the mission 
valorously enough, but he lost his courage 
presently, and returned empty-handed. 

I then sent one of my helpers, a spare man 
who worked for me occasionally, as he had 
been long connected with the manufacture 
and handling of explosives. I gave him the 
necessary money for the purchase of the ma- 
terial, for the hire of the team and his other 
expenses, and as there would be two or 
three dollars over, I told him he could spend 
[119] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

that in any way lie liked, for Ms own use and 
behoof. 

He returned along toward evening, left 
the horse and wagon at the stable, and 
started up to the works with a bag contain- 
ing ten pounds of fulminate, placed in a 
small hand-valise. Fortunately I saw him 
coming soon after he had abandoned the 
vehicle. 

The road was altogether too narrow for 
him; the ground seemed to reel under his 
feet, and he was steadying himself by swing- 
ing the valise back and forth from side to 
side with great violence. A drunker man 
never walked. 

I took the valise away from him, and car- 
ried it to the works myself. The next day, 
when we opened it, we found that instruc- 
tions had not been followed about wetting 
the fulminate. The bag of dry fulminate 
had, when he procured it, been merely set in 
a pail of water for a few minutes, and only 
long enough to wet a thin stratum of the ex- 
plosive, leaving the whole interior perfectly 
dry. 

It is surely a wonder that the drunken 
man had not exploded this mass of dry ful- 
[120] 



THE DRUNKEN MESSENGER 

minate in the rough handling he had given 
it. Had he fallen with the bag, he must al- 
most certainly have caused an explosion by 
the shock of the impact of the fulminate 
against the ground. 



[ 121 ] 



NITROGLYCERIN BY AUTOMOBILE 

AT another time, I required some very 
r\ pure nitroglycerin. As this material, 
like the fulminate of mercury, could 
not be transported by either freight or ex- 
press, it was necessary to go and bring it 
over by horse and wagon, or by automobile. 
I decided to go and fetch it myself with my 
automobile, which, at that time, was a 
Haynes-Apperson of one of the early makes. 
That machine had the faculty of going wrong 
oftener and in more places than any other 
piece of machinery I ever saw or heard of. 

It had a very short wheel base, and, as the 
steering gear had worn so much that there 
was a good deal of lost motion, it required 
very great skill to keep the car in the road. 
No sooner would it be brought in line with 
the highway than it would immediately pro- 
ceed toward the ditch or some wall or tree. 
It swayed from side to side of the road like 
a drunken man, and it was necessary, in 

1 132 ] 



NITROGLYCERIN BY. AUTOMOBILE 

order to keep it in the road at all, to calcu- 
late an average with it. 

As it was quite a long drive to where I was 
to procure the nitroglycerin, I went into 
New York and brought out a young chauf- 
feur from the Haynes-Apperson Company, 
explaining to him fully why I wanted him, 
and for what I was going. I made him un- 
derstand that I did not want him to start to 
accompany me unless he had the courage to 
stand by me to the end. He was all courage ; 
bravery seemed to ooze out of him at every 
pore. 

When we started on our journey, early the 
next morning, I found that he was wholly un- 
able to steer the automobile. He could not 
keep it in the road at all, and I had to drive 
it all the way myself; but, as he understood 
the machine and how to repair it, I concluded 
that he might prove valuable on that account. 
And he did, for during the outgoing and re- 
turn trip, that old machine broke down three 
times, and the tires went flat four times. 

On arrival at the factory, I let the chauf- 
feur wait while I went to procure the nitro- 
glycerin. I took a lot of bicarbonate of soda 
with me, with which I absorbed the nitro- 
[123] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

glycerin, forming a sort of paste. This ren- 
dered it safe to handle, and, by placing it in 
water, I could at any time dissolve out the 
bicarbonate of soda, and leave the pure 
nitroglycerin. 

When I had prepared fifty pounds of nitro- 
glycerin in this manner, placed it in glass 
jars and rolled them up with several thick- 
nesses of felt covering material, I had them 
taken up to the automobile and placed in the 
rear part of it. 

I then told the young chauffeur that I was 
ready to proceed, but he said that he had 
been talking with the men in the office, and 
that they had told him that they would not 
ride with Mr. Maxim in that automobile with 
that nitroglycerin for all the money in the 
world. They had frightened the fellow 
nearly out of his wits. It was with much 
persuasion and reasoning and insistence that 
I finally got him to consent to get into the 
car with me and ride along a very smooth 
even road to the skirts of the town, letting 
him believe that he could there escape, and 
that I would proceed alone. 

When we got a little out of the town, I re- 
minded him of his agreement to stick with 
[124] 



NITROGLYCERIN BZ AUTOMOBILE 

me, and told him that it would be out of the 
question for me to attempt to proceed alone 
without an assistant, as I had but one hand, 
and could not repair the machine very well 
if anything should go wrong. But he was 
deaf to all entreaties. 

Then I told him, with highly colored em- 
phasis and significant gestures, that, should 
he not proceed with me, as he had agreed, I 
might prove then and there more dangerous 
to his comfort and well-being than the nitro- 
glycerin — and I kept him with me ! 

After having traveled a few miles, the 
chauffeur began to recover his courage, and 
I had no more trouble with him. 

As I was ascending a steep grade along 
a narrow road, on the return trip, I saw a 
big touring car bearing down upon me, with 
a party of four young men and two young 
women in it. They were traveling like the 
wind. I turned out of the road as far as I 
possibly could, and stopped my car, and 
signaled with my hand to them to slow 
down, pointing to the narrowness of the 
road. 

They gave little heed to this, and rushed 
by me like a tornado, coming so close that 
[ 125 ], 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

they could not have missed my machine, hub 
to hub, more than an inch. 

There is little consolation in the fact that, 
had they struck us, they never would have 
known how foolish a thing they had done. 



[126] 



THE JETS OF BLUE 

A CHEMIST friend of mine once in- 
vented a process of converting nitro- 
benzole into tri-nitro-benzole by a 
very quick and labor-saving method, which 
consisted in mixing the nitro-benzole with 
nitric acid, confining the mixture in a large, 
strong, steel cylinder, then gradually heat- 
ing the cylinder until the required pressure 
should be produced, which was expected to 
effect the desired reaction. 

Accordingly, ^ve hundred pounds of nitro- 
benzole was mixed with the necessary quan- 
tity of nitric acid of the requisite strength, 
and the heating process was begun. 

iWhile anxiously watching this infernal 
machine, my friend saw a peculiar blue flame 
emerge from the seam around the head. 
Being of an alert nature, and able to take a 
hint without being kicked by an elephant, he 
withdrew from the vicinity of that cylinder. 
He did not merely sidle away from the peril- 
ous place — he fairly flew with an alacrity 
[127] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

born of desperation. He had barely emerged 
from the laboratory when there was a ter- 
rific explosion that leveled the building, and 
formed an enormous crater in the earth 
where he had stood, the concussion knocking 
him senseless. And, today, he still swears, 
with solemn earnestness, that a freight car 
could have been buried in the hole that was 
blown in the ground when his pet project 
went off. 

This experience so impressed him that he 
concluded that explosive compounds possess 
properties which place them in a class by 
themselves, and that it is a good class to 
avoid. 



[128] 



THE WISDOM OF EETEEAT 

DURING the experiments with Maxi- 
mite at Sandy Hook, previous to its 
purchase and adoption by the United 
States Government, I was loading some shell 
in a small house, near where a ten-inch gun 
was being fired. About a year or so before, 
when a ten-inch gun of this particular make 
was being tested at Sandy Hook, the breech 
block blew out, went through the bomb-proof, 
and killed several officers and men. 

Having completed my work, I started 
up the railroad track in the direction 
of the steamboat landing, to return home, 
when there came the ring of the bell for 
another discharge of the cannon. As the 
breech of the gun was pointing in my direc- 
tion, I recalled the above fatality; but I rea- 
soned with myself that, as a large number 
of tests had since been made with these guns, 
and as the defect in the breech mechanism 
was supposed to have been corrected, the 
chance of the breech blowing out at this 
[129] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

particular discliarge and coming my way 
was infinitely small. 

Nevertheless, I thought, it is exactly on 
such occasions that the unexpected does hap- 
pen. So I ran for all I was worth up the 
track and off at one side. Then I heard the 
report of the gun, and looking around, saw 
that sure enough the breech block had blown 
out, and saw it pass through a building in 
its path. I saw it strike the track over 
which I had been walking, cut a rail off, saw 
it strike the old stone fort beyond me, and 
ricochet high into the air. 

There was an immediate shower of stones 
and debris falling around me, which I dex- 
terously dodged. On examining the small 
house where I had been charging the Maxi- 
mite shell I found that the windows were 
fairly riddled with pieces of smokeless pow- 
der, which had been blown from the breech 
of the gun. 



[ 130 ] 



THE EACE WITH DEATH 

A MONG the many dynamite plants that 
A% hang upon the verdant hills of the 
American countryside, there is one 
which stands somewhat apart from the rail- 
road, and the dynamite has to be carted to 
the station over the highway. At one point 
the highway passes close to the edge of a 
precipice of considerable height, at the bot- 
tom of whose abrupt, ragged sides nestles a 
pleasant villa, owned by a wealthy business 
man. ^ 

A friend of mine, who told me the story, 
had just paid a visit to this factory of ex- 
plosives, and was walking leisurely along the 
road. At a distance of perhaps a hundred 
yards ahead of him there was one of the 
dynamite wagons, moving two tons of dyna- 
mite to the railroad. The driver had re- 
cently purchased a couple of fresh horses, 
which he pronounced ^^a spanking pair." 
They were rather restive and shied at every- 
thing they saw. But the driver was a brave 
[131] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

fellow and a strong one, and he had no fear 
of being unable to control them. 

All at once, under the impulse of a gust of 
wind, a newspaper flared up in front of them. 
Quick as a flash, they bolted, rushing head- 
long, the bits held firmly between their teeth ; 
while the high-piled load of dynamite swayed 
from side to side menacingly as the wagon 
took the curves of the road. 

At this instant the foreman of the dyna- 
mite-works flashed by, driving a pair of 
horses to an empty wagon. He had observed 
the plight of the driver of the dynamite 
wagon, and was lashing his horses in mad 
pursuit. 

Although the foreman's team was inferior, 
still his wagon was empty, and he was soon 
neck and neck with the runaway horses. For 
several hundred yards it was a close race, 
neither achieving any appreciable advantage 
over the other. Nearer and nearer were 
they coming to the precipice, which yawned 
just where the road turned sharply to the 
right. Still on and on they flew, when, in a 
moment of advantage, the foreman leaped 
from his wagon, full upon the neck and head 
of the nigh horse of the runaway pair, and 
[132] 



TEE RACE WITH DEATH 

brought the team to a standstill within less 
than fifty feet of the precipice, and directly 
over the villa I have mentioned. 

Had not this foreman possessed both the 
presence of mind and the athletic qualifica- 
tions necessary, coupled with great daring, 
that load of dynamite must inevitably have 
gone over the precipice as the horses struck 
that curve. Little the peaceful occupants of 
the villa under the hill imagined what a 
calamity at that fearful moment overhung 
them ! 



1 133 ] 



THE INDOMITABLE POET 

AN editor in a large Western mining city 
/-\ once hit upon a happy expedient for 
getting rid of obnoxious callers. To 
this end, he filled a gunpowder keg with 
ashes, inserted a fuze, piled a handful of 
black gunpowder around it, to give the whole 
an air of reality, and established the ar- 
rangement on a table in his ante-room. On 
the advent of certain bores, the office boy fol- 
lowed instructions by lighting the fuze, and 
walking out of the room with the audible 
remark : 

*'I^m goin' to blow up that old guy in 
there !^' 

The thing proved its worth as an auto- 
matic bouncer, until, on a memorable day, a 
long-haired, calf-eyed, dreamy-looking young 
male person came into the place, who in- 
formed the office boy that he desired to see 
the editor. He explained in cadenced speech 
that he deigned to exhibit to the editor a 
poetic effusion, the lucubration of a fine 
[134] 



THE INDOMITABLE POET 

frenzy, fairly oozing divine afflatus, on the 
Surplusage of Over- Soul in Young Maidens. 

On hearing his minion's report concerning 
the visitor, the editor told the boy to light 
the fuze and to ask the poet to sit down ; that 
the editor would see him in half an hour. 

When the editor went out into the ante- 
room the fuze had burned out, the surface 
gunpowder had flashed off, but the poet was 
still sitting there. 



[135] 



SCATTERED 

I WAS once called as an expert to visit a 
dynamite plant where a new kind of liigh 
explosive was being manufactured in- 
stead of the ordinary nitroglycerin dyna- 
mite. It consisted of a mixture of chlorate 
of potash, sulphur, charcoal and paraffin 
wax. Its inventor had given it the reassur- 
ing name of Double X Safety Dynamite. 

A quarryman in a nearby town had, with 
his safety-ignoring habitude, attempted to 
load a hole with the stuff, using a crowbar 
as a rammer, with the result that he set off 
the charge, and the crowbar went through 
his head. 

This unscheduled eventuation aroused the 
apprehension of the president of the com- 
pany, who was also its backer. He began to 
grow suspicious about the safety of the ma- 
terial. Being so much interested, he went 
with me on my visit of inspection. 

We left the train at a siding about a mile 
from the works, and had just started in their 
[136] 



SCATTERED 

direction when there came a sudden boom 
and roar, and the earth shook. Over the 
powder works there rose a huge column of 
black smoke, flaring wide into the sky. 

We found a great crater where the mixing 
house had stood. Three men were working 
in the building when the explosion occurred. 
A fortunate survivor who had left the place 
a moment before to go for a bucket of drink- 
ing water, was walking about the crater, ap- 
parently searching for something among the 
scattered remnants. As we approached him, 
he sadly said: 

**I can't find much of the boys. I guess 
you'll have to plow the ground if you want 
to bury them.'' 



[137] 



A LIVELY DEAD ONE 

SEVERAL years ago, at the works of the 
American Forcite Company, a batch of 
nitrogelatin blew up in process of 
manufacture and several men were killed. 
One laborer who was working so close to 
where the explosion occurred that his cloth- 
ing was nearly all blown off and he was 
spattered with the blood of his companions 
and crazed by the shock, started in a wild 
and aimless run along the road, with his tat- 
tered garments flying in the wind. 

A woman of the neighborhood, whose hus- 
band was employed at the works, intercepted 
him with the eager inquiry: 

^*Is anyone killed! " 

*^Yes, yes!'' said he, ''We are all killed! 
Every one of us is killed!" 

And it was some time before he could be 
convinced that he was not among the dead. 



[ 138 ] 



INCIDENTS IN THE DEVELOPMENT 
OF MOTORITE 

MOTORITE consists of a componnd of 
about seventy per cent, nitroglycerin 
and thirty per cent, gelatinated gun- 
cotton, the mixture being compounded in 
such a way as to form a tough and rubbery 
substance. This material is made into bars, 
which are smoothed and varnished upon the 
outside and then forced into steel tubes. In 
use, these steel tubes are placed in an ap- 
paratus in such wise that the bar of motorite 
can be ignited only at the exposed end, in a 
combustion chamber, into which water is 
forced, and as the combustion is confined to 
that end, it proceeds with absolute uniform- 
ity, according to the pressure, and without 
explosion. In other words, the motorite acts 
as a fuel, the products of combustion serving 
as a flame blast, blowing the water through 
a series of baffle plates, atomizing it, and 
converting it instantly into steam. The ob- 
[139] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

ject of motorite is to replace compressed air 
in the driving of motors for self-propelled 
torpedoes. 

I have already expended more than fifty- 
thousand dollars in experiments with motor- 
ite and on different kinds of apparatus for 
its use. As about four times as much energy 
is available for driving a torpedo by this 
system as by any other, I hope some time to 
effect arrangements for the equipment of 
torpedoes with it. 

The first bars of motorite that I made, I 
formed by passing through a die. The re- 
sult was that a small, microscopic flaw which 
could not be seen with the naked eye ex- 
tended through the bars from end to end, 
so that, when the bar was placed in the com- 
bustion apparatus, the flame of ignition 
passed immediately down through the flaw, 
exploding the apparatus. 

After the first apparatus blew up, I 
made another one, and, as I could not very 
well conduct the experiments at the place 
where the first mishap occurred, I hired a 
floor in a building to make the test. But I 
needed an assistant, and it was problem- 
atical where I could find one. 
[140] 



TEE DEVELOPMENT OF MOTORITE 

One day, while returning home, I was ac- 
costed by a panhandler, a young man claim- 
ing to have just arrived from Pittsburg, 
seeking work. I told him that if he was ac- 
tually looking for work I had a job for him, 
and I bade him come right along with me. 
I took him home that night, fed him, and 
watched him. 

The next morning we went down to the 
shop. I explained to him all about the na- 
ture of the experiment that I was about to 
try, and told him that, if he had any timid- 
ity, the time to abscond was then and there. 
He told me that he was not afraid of any- 
thing, if I was not. 

**Very well, then," I said, *^I do not ex- 
pect the thing to blow up ; otherwise, I would 
not be here." 

I got my time-watch ready, and told him 
to press the electric button to ignite the 
motorite. Instantly there was a terrific ex- 
plosion. The windows were blown out into 
the street, and pieces of the shattered ap- 
paratus were driven into the ceiling and into 
the wall all about us ; but fortunately neither 
of us was hit. 

John looked calmly about him for 

[141] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

a moment, and then at me, and remarked: 

''God, slie busted!" 

"While we were recovering from our 
amazement, half a dozen policemen rushed 
into the place, accompanied by a priest. I 
explained the mishap the best way I could, 
and, seeing that the priest was a handsome, 
genial, good-natured fellow, I appealed to 
him. He had a little chat with the police- 
men, and they all left. 

I sent that priest a box of the best cigars 
that I could buy. 

Under the counsel and advice of the land- 
lord I then moved away from there. 

I next bought a house, and in the back yard 
I built a laboratory with no windows or 
doors in it, except a skylight at the top and 
the windows and doors that fronted my 
house. The walls were of brick, and made 
thick. The skylight at the top was a large 
one, and was arranged to open up full size. 
Special precautions were taken by means of 
various attachments to cause the roof to stay 
on in case of emergency. 

A new apparatus was made and erected 
and got ready to test. This time my wife 
was my assistant, and we arranged to touch 
[ 142 ] 



TEE DEVELOPMENT OF MOTORITE 

the thing off by electricity from the house. 
Again it exploded, and one of the fragments 
of the apparatus, coming through the open 
door, struck the wooden wall behind which 
my wife and I were standing and nearly 
passed through it. 

On entering the laboratory, I discovered 
for the first time what was the actual cause 
of the trouble, namely, the longitudinal flaw 
already referred to, evidenced by the frag- 
ments of the motorite that remained after 
the explosion, for motorite, like smokeless 
gunpowder, when subjected to explosive 
pressure, is immediately extinguished upon 
the release of the pressure, so that when the 
apparatus blew up, all of the unconsumed 
motorite was extinguished, just as when the 
projectile leaves the gun any unburned 
smokeless powder is extinguished and is 
blown out in front of the gun, where the 
partially consumed grains may be recovered. 

The next motorite was made by rolling the 
material into sheets, cutting into discs, seal- 
ing them together under pressure, and in 
that way building up the bars, which pre- 
cluded the possibility of there being any 
flaws. 

[143] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

Some motorite was soon made in this man- 
ner, and another apparatus constructed, 
which was tested and which worked very sat- 
isfactorily. 

Following this successful result, I built a 
laboratory at a dynamite plant near Lake 
Hopatcong for conducting the experiments 
on a larger scale. 

My assistant at the motorite laboratory 
was one of that American country type, ab- 
solutely honest, perfectly fearless, painstak- 
ing and diligent, of such timber as the great 
men of the earth are made. He was alto- 
gether a most lovable fellow. He had all his 
life worked with explosives, and was a 
veteran in the manufacture and use of nitro- 
glycerin and dynamite. But, when doing 
pioneer work with explosives, there is al- 
ways an unavoidable element of risk, even 
when the greatest care is taken. 

We at first had the hydraulic press, in 
which we built up the sticks of motorite, lo- 
cated in the laboratory room itself; but I 
suggested to my assistant one day that it- 
had better be placed outside, and a heavy 
brick wall built between us and the press, as 
a barricade in case of a possible accident. 
[IM] 



TEE DEVELOPMENT OF MOTORITE 

'^For," I said, ** suppose you should by- 
oversight neglect to put in the leather pack- 
ing between the piston and the motorite, we 
might have an explosion." 

He said that he could hardly forget that 
precaution. Nevertheless, the press was 
placed outside, and the barricade built. The 
very first time that we used the press there- 
after he did forget the packing, with the re- 
sult that the press exploded. Although we 
were behind the barricade, still the concus- 
sion brought us to our knees. Had the ex- 
plosion occurred while the press was being 
operated in the main laboratory, we should 
both have certainly been very seriously in- 
jured, if not killed. 

It was a matter of several months before 
the full-sized torpedo apparatus with which 
we were to experiment was completed and 
erected, and the necessary quantity of mo- 
torite made. 

On the day before the regular test was to 
be conducted, I was called to Morristown, 
as expert on a case in court, and I left orders 
with my assistant to make up an additional 
small quantity of sealing compound, used 
for sealing the discs of motorite together in 
[145] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

building up the bars. This sealing material 
was made of a mixture of nitroglycerin, gun- 
cotton, camphor and acetate of amyl. 

As I did not receive the telegram to go to 
Morristown until after I left home that 
morning, my wife expected that I would be 
working at the laboratory that day, but knew 
that I might possibly have a call to Morris- 
town. 

On my way home that evening, I was in- 
formed by a neighbor that there had been 
an explosion in my laboratory, that my as- 
sistant had been killed, and that the place 
had been burned down. I hastened to the 
spot and found my wife there waiting for 
me. All that was left of my assistant lay 
in an adjacent building covered with a piece 
of sacking. 

That was one of the saddest moments of 
my whole life. It is impossible to know what 
little slip or misjudgment may have pro- 
duced the explosion. A little inadvertence in 
the handling of a bottle of nitroglycerin may 
have been the cause. 

The manner in which my wife was in- 
formed of the accident was about on a par 
with that employed by the Irishman who 
[146] 



TEE DEVELOPMENT OF MOTORITE 

took the remains of a fellow- workman, killed 
by an explosion, home to his wife in a wheel- 
barrow, and, knocking upon the door, asked ; 

**Does the widdy McGinnis live here?'' 

She replied: ^^Indade, and I'm not a 
widdy. ' ' 

And he said : *^ And faith ye are, for I have 
his rimnants here in the wheelbarry with 
me." 

A butcher was the messenger-bearer to 
Mrs. Maxim. He said: 

**Mrs. Maxim, have you heard the news 
about the explosion?" 

And he continued: *'Mr. Maxim's labora- 
tory blew up and burned down today. They 
have found some of his assistant, but they 
haven't found any of Mr. Maxim yet." 

Mrs. Maxim immediately rushed to the 
scene of the accident, where she learned the 
welcome news that I was in Morristown that 
day. 

It was a matter of another year of hard 
work before I was again ready to make a 
new trial of the torpedo apparatus. There 
were several amusing experiences in connec- 
tion with that testing. 

[147] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

The apparatus held a charge of one hun- 
dred and ten pounds of motorite. "Water 
was pumped continuously through a water 
jacket over the steel cylinders containing the 
burning motorite and into the combustion 
chamber during each run. The apparatus 
was provided with an exhaust valve so con- 
structed as to control, to a nicety, the pres- 
sure in the combustion chamber. 

Under three hundred pounds pressure to 
the square inch, which was what was mainly 
used, the motorite burned at the rate of a 
foot in length per minute, and as each foot 
in length weighed twenty-five pounds, it 
burned at the rate of twenty-five pounds per 
minute. Each pound of motorite evaporated 
a little more than two pounds of water, and 
the products of combustion, mingling with 
the steam produced, escaped from the ex- 
haust valve through an inch-and-a-half 
nozzle. 

The roar of the escaping gas and steam 
was so great that it was impossible to hear 
one shout at the top of his voice. The loud- 
est shout was less than a whisper. The roar 
could be heard with great distinctness more 
than two miles away. A good idea can be 
[148] 



TEE DEVELOPMENT OF MOTORITE 

had of the violence with which the steam and 
gases escaped, from the fact that a door, 
which accidentally swung shut during one of 
the runs in front of the nozzle, although 
seven feet distant, was blown from its 
hinges, broken in two, and the fragments 
hurled twenty feet away. The noise was so 
confounding, that it was some time before my 
assistants and myself could keep our senses 
about us and note and record the pressures 
on the various gauges during a run, although 
the apparatus was separated from us by a 
barricade so strong and heavy that there was 
no possibility of our being injured, even 
should there be an explosion. 

One day, just as we were about to make a 
run, the superintendent of a nearby explo- 
sives works called upon us, and I asked him 
if he would like to see the run, and he said 
he would. 

I then asked him to note particularly and 
to record the pressure on a certain gauge. 
The run lasted about ^ve minutes and, on 
turning to him for his notes, he himself was 
surprised that he had been so confounded by 
the noise that he had not thought of look- 
ing at the gauge at all. 
[149] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

On the day when the final test took place, 
the firm of torpedo-builders that was inter- 
ested with me in the apparatus sent several 
representatives, including their chief engi- 
neer, vice-president and other officers of the 
company, to witness the test. Everything 
being in readiness, and each member of the 
committee being convinced that there was no 
possible danger in remaining in proximity to 
the apparatus and back of the barricade, 
while it was being tested, I gave each of the 
committee explicit instructions to watch the 
various gauges and to note the pressures, 
while the chief engineer and myself were to 
watch the nozzle gauge, and to observe the 
character and force of the steam and gases 
escaping from the nozzle. 

I told the several members of the committee 
it was indispensable that they should care- 
fully watch the pressure gauges during the 
entire run. As it was a condition of the test 
that I should get up steam within ten seconds, 
the chief engineer stood ready with his stop- 
watch when the electric button was pressed 
to ignite the motorite. 

As the action was instantaneous, that is to 
say, as steam was got up practically in- 
[150] 



TEE DEVELOPMENT OF MOTORITE 

stantaneously and was escaping at the noz- 
zle under full head as quickly as a gun could 
be fired, he did not think of his stop-watch, 
and it was some little time before I could get 
him to look at the pressure gauge on the noz- 
zle, so as to observe the character of the es- 
caping steam. His eyes had a blank, mean- 
ingless look, but it must be confessed that he 
had the grit to stand there. Not so, how- 
ever, with the other members of the com- 
mittee. Each of them was far more inter- 
ested in his own individual run than he was 
in the run of the apparatus, for not one of 
them was in sight when the run was com- 
pleted. They came straggling back sheep- 
ishly, but no urging sufficed to bring them 
near the apparatus during any of the suc- 
ceeding runs. 



[151] 



THE MULE GUN 

IN the old days when the Indians were 
sometimes troublesome on the Western 
frontier, an officer in the regular army, 
who was rather an ingenious fellow, con- 
ceived the idea of making a mountain gun 
out of a mule and the barrel of a common 
field-piece, using the mule for the carriage. 
He therefore had the gun securely mounted 
on the back of the beast. 

They had not proceeded far with this 
novel battery, when a small knot of hostile 
savages was espied quietly eating their mid- 
day meal within easy range. The mounted 
gun was forthwith loaded heavily with grape 
and canister, the mule taken by the head and 
pointed in the direction of the Indians. A 
short piece of fuze that had been placed in 
the touch-hole of the gun was ignited. 

The mule, hearing the sizzing of the fuze, 

began to rear and snort and kick and whirl 

about, while the officer and his men scudded 

to cover, and flattened themselves out upon 

[152] 



THE MULE GUN 

the ground. They had not long to wait when 
there was a terrific crash. The gun had ex- 
ploded under the overcharge, with the utter 
demolition of the mule carriage. 

The Indians, hearing the report, looked 
quickly about them, and seeing the frag- 
ments of an exploded mule rocketing through 
the air, were frightened nearly out of their 
wits, and fled precipitately. 



[153] 



HOW GUSSIE GOT LOADED 

WHEN I was a young man I taught 
several terms of school in Maine, 
where, in the small country dis- 
tricts, the teacher is expected to be a walk- 
ing encyclopedia of information. 

One day there came a loud knock upon the 
door of the schoolhouse. On going out to 
see what was the cause of the imperative 
summons, I found standing there the wife of 
one of the neighbors, white as a sheet with 
agitation and alarm. She excitedly told me 
that her little boy, Gussie, had just swal- 
lowed a bullet, and she asked me what she 
should do for him. 

**Why," said I pleasantly, '^Give him a 
good charge of gunpowder. But be careful 
not to point him toward anybody.'' 

She went home and gave him a dose of 
gunpowder, without ever seeing the joke. 



1 154 T 



DYNAMITE'S FEEAK 

A CONTRACTOR, who does business up 
in New York State, told me the follow- 
ing story: 

A carload of nitroglycerin dynamite had 
been shipped to him, but was held up in a 
freight-house for a day or two before de- 
livery to him. One night while it was there, 
the freight-house took fire. Hearing the fire- 
alarm and looking out, he was astounded to 
see that it was the freight-house burning. 
Believing that his carload of dynamite would 
be sure to explode, he started to run to the 
scene in all haste, to warn the firemen and 
others to keep far away from the inevitable 
explosion, when, suddenly, there was a great 
burst of flame, which shot high into the sky 
and flared out bright and wild in all direc- 
tions, sending up an enormous column of 
smoke. But this fierce combustion lasted 
only a few minutes, and then subsided. 

He knew that his dynamite had burned up, 
and, curiously enough, without exploding. 
[155] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

He met the fire chief after the conflagra- 
tion, and they spoke of the fire. The chief 
remarked that there must have been some 
very combustible freight on one of the cars. 
He said that, when the fire first started, the 
firemen played a full stream of water on this 
car, but it did not do any good. The car 
burned so fast and so fierce that they had 
to rush away for their lives, or they would 
have been consumed by the intense heat, and 
he wondered what it could be that would 
burn so fiercely. 

When told that it was a carload of dyna- 
mite, he felt like a man who discovers the 
next day that he had, during the night, 
walked along the sheer edge of a high preci- 
pice. 

Although dynamite in such quantities as a 
carload when ignited is almost certain to ex- 
plode instead of merely burning, still, some- 
times, even that quantity will take fire and 
burn up completely without exploding ; while, 
at other times, a single stick of dynamite 
when ignited will detonate. 



[ 156 3' 



EXPLOSIVE VAGAEIES 

ONE of the old importers of picric acid 
in this country told me the follow- 
ing story : 

He sold about five tons of picric acid to a 
manufacturer of dynamite doing business at 
a certain place up the Hudson, for employ- 
ment as an ingredient in a particular kind of 
high explosive. 

Not being very familiar with picric acid 
and the character of the exploder necessary 
to detonate it, the purchaser had poor suc- 
cess with it, and he called upon the importer 
with the grievance that he had been sold 
such a poor lot of picric acid that it was ac- 
tually non-explosive, and was therefore prac- 
tically worthless, and he wanted the seller to 
take it back immediately. 

The importer could not convince him that 

he was mistaken, although he insisted that it 

was only necessary to know how to explode 

it, and that, when properly detonated, it wa3 

[157] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

one of the most powerful explosives in the 
world. 

*^No," said the purchaser, *Hhat picric 
acid you have sent me is not an explo- 
sive. ' ' 

He admitted he knew that picric acid was 
recognized as a very powerful explosive ; but 
he was sure of one thing — that the picric 
acid that had been sent him was not an ex- 
plosive. 

^^Why," said he, *4t is no more explosive 
than sand, and I want you to take it back.'' 

^^All right,'' said the importer, *^you may 
return me a sample of it, and I will submit 
it to the requisite tests, and if it proves an 
inferior lot I will take it back." 

That day, during the purchaser's absence, 
some workmen were moving a barrel of the 
picric acid in order to let a plumber mend a 
small leak in a lead pipe, which supplied the 
place with water. Over and about this lead 
pipe had been spilled a considerable quan- 
tity of picric acid, which had formed picrate 
of lead with the lead pipe. 

The friction from the barrel set off this 
picrate of lead, which in turn detonated the 
picric acid; and the whole five tons went off 
[158] 



EXPLOSIVE VAGARIES 

with such violence as amply to demonstrate 
its explosive qualities. 

The following day the purchaser returned 
to the importer with the complaint that that 
picric acid sold him was the most sensitive, 
most violent and treacherous explosive 
material in the world. 

The importer laughed, and reminded him 
of their previous conversation. But, as the 
dynamite factory had been demolished and 
several men killed, the purchaser did not 
respond very readily to the humor of the 
situation. 



[159] 



THE TUEKEY THAT WENT TO BED 

POSSIBLY it may not be diverging too 
much from dynamite stories to tell of 
an experience of mine with a steam- 
cooker, wMcli I invented away back in the 
eighties. 

In this cooker I was able to roast and bake 
by superheated steam. Sometimes it worked 
very well. At other times the safety valve 
gave me a great deal of trouble, being alto- 
gether too uncertain in its action. 

One day I was sitting alone in the kitchen, 
steam-roasting a turkey, when dispossessed 
Bridget, who was waiting in an adjoining 
room, opened the kitchen door, and took a 
sly peep at me. I was endeavoring to con- 
vince her that the thing was perfectly safe, 
when, of a sudden, that cooker blew up. The 
kitchen windows were blown out, the door 
ripped off its hinges, and the stove de- 
molished. 

Fortunately, none of the fragments found 
either Bridget or me. The oven portion of 

two J, 



TEE TURKEY. THAT WENT TO BED 

the cooker, containing the turkey, went up- 
stairs somewhere, through the ceiling. Later 
developments showed that the turkey had 
gone to bed in the room over the kitchen. 
That cooker was my first patent. 



1161] 



BILL BENNETT, DETECTIVE 

WE had a neighbor, when I was a 
young man down in Maine, by the 
name of Bill Bennett, a hard-work- 
ing farmer, who was very prond of his pile 
of dry hard wood, which he had prepared for 
the winter's cold. 

Late in the autumn, however, the wood be- 
gan to disappear faster than he thought it 
ought. He was sure that someone was steal- 
ing it, and inasmuch as his nearest neigh- 
bors had no store of wood whatsoever, and, 
too, were notoriously shiftless, he concluded 
that they must be the pilferers. 

A little bit of detective work that he prac- 
ticed to ascertain the truth of his conclu- 
sions was certainly ingenious and worked 
well. 

Bennett took a dozen sticks of wood, and 
bored a large hole in the end of each of them, 
which he filled with rifle powder, putting 
about a pound into each stick. He then 
plugged the holes skillfully to conceal the 
[162] 



BILL BENNETT, DETECTIVE 

evidences of his work, sawing off a short bit 
of the plugged end of each stick, so that the 
plug would not show, and distributed these 
sticks upon the part of the pile that was 
shrinking. He was careful to select the wood 
for his own burning from another portion of 
the heap. 

The following evening he was looking from 
his window toward the house of the neigh- 
bors, wondering how long it would be before 
his ingenuity bore fruit, when suddenly there 
was a flash, a crash and a roar, followed by 
screams of ^ ^Murder!'' and *^Fire!" 

The mystery had been solved. 



[163] 



WINNING THE OX 

THIS Bill Bennett was a good deal 
of a marksman, and one day while 
attending a county fair, where he 
had imbibed a considerable measure of bot- 
tled-up unsteadiness, he came reeling along 
to a group of men who were engaged in 
shooting at a target. The range was long, 
and the price paid by each contestant for a 
chance to display his skill, or lack of it, was 
a dollar a shot, but the prize was a fat ox, 
which was destined to go to the first who 
made a bulPs-eye. As yet none had suc- 
ceeded in making the lucky shot. 

Bill staggered into position, and threw 
down a ten-dollar bill for ten shots. The at- 
tendants steadied him sufficiently to confine 
his wild target practice to that part of the 
sky and horizon where the target was lo- 
cated. 

Bill had wasted nine shots without coming 
within speaking distance of the target, which 
to his drunken sight appeared to be double. 
[164] 



WINNING THE OX 

EoUing like a ship in a storm, Bill brought 
the gun to his shoulder for the last round, 
declaring, **By gum, I'm agoing to hit one 
of them targets this time/' 

And he did. As they went sailing by, he 
let blaze at them, and behold, it was a bull 's- 
eye ! Bill had won the ox on a one-to-a-mil- 
lion chance. 



[165] 



A DUEL TO THE DEATH 

IN" the old pioneer days of Maine, when it 
was still a province of Massachusetts, a 
young French officer had an altercation 
with the chief of the Oldtown Indians, and 
according to the custom of the times, chal- 
lenged the Eed Man to fight a duel with him. 

The old Indian, according to the courtesies 
of the game, was allowed the choice of 
weapons, and he chose two kegs of gunpow- 
der. Each was to sit upon a keg, with the 
bung out. Then two pistols were to be dis- 
charged in succession. On the firing of the 
first pistol, two iron pokers, heated to a 
white heat, were to be laid upon a table be- 
side the duelists, which was to be immedi- 
ately followed by the discharge of the sec- 
ond pistol. At this signal they were each to 
seize a poker and thrust it into the bung-hole 
of the keg on which his adversary was sit- 
ting, the old Indian calculating that he would 
be quicker than the Frenchman. 

But the Frenchman had a little calcula- 
[166] 



A DUEL TO THE DEATH 

tion of his own, and lie figured out something 
that the Indian had doubtless not thought of. 
This was that the explosion of either keg 
would be certain to explode the other. 

But he made a bluff of it, thinking that the 
old Indian too might be bluffing, and so every- 
thing was arranged. Each mounted his re- 
spective keg and the first pistol was fired. 
The savage was a graven image, but the 
Frenchman did not wait for the second sig- 
nal, and unlike Lot's wife, he never looked 
back. 



[167] 



THE BEWITCHED FLINTLOCK 

MY father used to tell a good story 
about a one-time chief of the Old- 
town Indians, and, as it had to do 
in a way with explosions — indeed, a series 
of them — I add it to my collection. 

There was a farmer living in an adjacent 
town, who frequently received visits from 
the old chief. On such occasions, the Eed 
Man always carried his shotgun with him. 
The weapon, according to the times, was a 
flintlock, single-barreled muzzle-loader. 

One day in the autumn, the farmer was 
feeding his turkeys by stringing a long line 
of corn upon the ground, on either side of 
which the turkeys were standing, head to 
head, in two opposing ranks for the feeding. 
The Indian was present, and the farmer 
asked his guest what he would give for a 
shot at that double line of turkeys' heads. 
The Indian answered that he would give five 
dollars, if he could have every turkey that 
he killed or wounded. The farmer, who had 
[168] 



THE BEWITCHED FLINTLOCK 

previously drawn the shot from the Indian's 
gun, leaving only the powder charge, ac- 
cepted the offer. 

The Indian leveled his gun and fired; but 
not a turkey fell. The old Eed Man looked 
puzzled. The farmer laughed at his marks- 
manship, but the old savage merely grunted, 
and went home. 

The chief appeared again next day, and 
the farmer asked him how he would like to 
take another shot, having again drawn off 
a charge of shot from the Indian's gun. 
He would gladly give another five dol- 
lars for a try. This time the discharge of 
the gun brought down a goodly number of 
turkeys. The Indian had taken the precau- 
tion of loading his gun with a double charge 
of shot. On the next visit received from 
the Indian, the farmer unloaded the gun 
down to the powder charge, then put in a 
wad of punk, and another powder charge 
with another wad of punk, and so on, until 
he had loaded the weapon nearly to the muz- 
zle. He then replaced the gun in its posi- 
tion in the corner, dropped a fire-coal into 
the muzzle, and invited the Indian to supper. 

After the lapse of a few minutes, the In- 
[ 169 ] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

dian's gun went off, bang! Much surprised, 
the Indian looked around, and remarked that 
it was a strange occurrence, that he had 
never before known his gun to go off by it- 
self. While he was still cogitating over the 
strange occurrence, bang! went the old gun 
again. 

The Indian hurried through his supper, 
very greatly perturbed, but he had not quite 
finished when the old gun spoke yet once 
again. The chief rose from the table hur- 
riedly, seized his ancient weapon, and started 
off for home with as nearly a display of 
agitation as is permissible to the dignity of 
the Eed Man. Before he had gone far, how- 
ever, the old gun uttered another bang! He 
then broke into a rapid run, and just as he 
arrived at his wigwam, the gun banged 
again. Now thoroughly frightened, he 
hurled it from him over a fence. Still, for 
more than two hours the Indian's weapon 
continued its mysterious barking. 

When the farmer explained the trick to the 
old chief, he felt that he had been somewhat 
compensated for the loss of his turkeys. 



[170] 



:WHEN HE SHIRKED 

A PROMINENT financier, who was a 
much better business man than he was 
inventor, read of Moissan's experi- 
ments in making artificial diamonds. The 
financier conceived the idea of converting an- 
thracite coal directly into diamonds by sub- 
jecting it to enormous pressure of gunpow- 
der exploded in a strong steel cylinder. 

As he wished to market a large quantity 
of his manufactured diamonds before their 
artificial character should leak out, he de- 
termined to conduct his experiments very se- 
cretly; consequently, he put the man-of -all- 
work at his country place upon the job. This 
faithful and useful servant was to report the 
progress of the work regularly at the city 
office of his employer. 

After trying several experiments with 
black gunpowder, the man reported that the 
scheme didn^t work — that no diamonds were 
produced. 

The financier then told the useful that he 

[ 171 ] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

had evidently reached the limit of power of 
black gunpowder. 

**Now try dynamite,'' said he. 

There was a break in the chain of reports, 
and he wrote the useful, asking him why 
he did not report. Still no answer. 

After waiting some days, the idea sud- 
denly struck the financier that possibly the 
process had proved successful and that the 
useful planned to betray him. He accord- 
ingly sent a peremptory telegram to him to 
report at once on pain of discharge. 

The next day a vision, swathed and ban- 
daged and perambulating on crutches, en- 
tered his office. 

'^You infernal old scoundrel!" yelled the 
wreck, as he entered. * ^ Blow a man up with 
dynamite, and then threaten to discharge 
him for not reporting!" 



[172] 



THE ELEVATION OF WOMANHOOD 

1HAD a certain man in my employ down 
at Maxim by the name of Benjamin Bill- 
ings, whom we called Ben Billingsgate. 
Ben held views very strongly prejudicial to 
dogs and matrimony. He was all that 
is implied by the term ** all-round useful." 
Though an erratic fellow, he was bright and 
energetic and seemed to be able to do any- 
thing under the sun when he set about it. 
But he lacked initiative, except in the expres- 
sion of his opinions about those two abomi- 
nations — dogs and matrimony. 

When he was young and ardent he had 
married Sukyanna, a maiden who was domi- 
nated by the delusion that she had been born 
with a mission, to which all other considera- 
tions were secondary and should be subordi- 
nated. She was also a woman with a pug 
dog. Benjamin's nerves had been frazzling 
out for some time, and his patience was 
sorely tried by the division of the lady's af- 
[ 173 ], 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

f ections between him and the dog — ^with a de- 
cided leaning toward the dog. 

One day he brought home to his wife a 
beautiful Christmas present, which consisted 
of a large colored photograph of himself, 
mounted in an exquisite gilt frame. The ex- 
pense of the thing represented a week's hard 
labor, but he wanted to create an impression 
upon his wife. He believed in doing things 
by wholes and in striking hard to win. His 
wife was very pleased — ^with the frame. 

On his return from work the following 
evening, he took a sidelong glance toward 
the mantel over which the picture had been 
hung. He did not recognize himself. There 
in the frame was a life-size photograph of 
the pug in place of his, which Sukyanna had 
removed. 

He uttered never a word, but his whole 
mental mechanism was turning somersaults. 
The next day, at roll-call, that dog was re- 
ported among the missing. 

Benjamin pretended to sympathize and to 
condole with his wife, but she was discon- 
solate. Some Gypsies had passed that way 
during the day, and it was suspected that 
they might have stolen the dog. The horse 
[174] 



TEE ELEVATION OF WOMANHOOD 

was accordingly hitched up and a drive of 
ten miles was taken. When the Gypsies were 
overhauled and rounded up, the pug was not 
discovered. Then an advertisement was in- 
serted in all the town papers. Still no pug. 
The canine continued a persistent absentee. 

As a matter of fact, Benjamin had devoted 
ingenuity enough to the destruction of that 
dog to form the basis of a Sherlock Holmes 
detective story. He had prepared a sort of 
canister-bomb, adapted to go off by a strong 
thump of any sort. The dog, the bomb and 
a stout rawhide string, with which to tether 
the bomb to the dog, were confidingly placed 
in the hands of a small boy in the neighbor- 
hood, known to have both a sense of humor 
and a taste for the mischievous. The boy 
was, however, fond of dogs, and it eventu- 
ated that he decided to keep the dog for him- 
self. Hence the delay in the finale of this 
story. 

But the urchin's sense of humor finally got 
the better of his affection. He found it im- 
possible to choke off the appeal to his 
imagination of hitching that bomb to the 
dog's tail. Consequently he took the pug out 
and carefully tied the canister to its tail. 

[1751 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

Following the ingenious instructions of Ben- 
jamin, as soon as he had done so he dodged 
into the house and shut the door before the 
dog realized what had happened. 

When the pug discovered itself a part of 
an infernal machine, old-home-week associa- 
tions rose up in its memory, and it made a 
bee-line for home and human mother. 

Benjamin had made a little miscalculation 
about the amount of thumping that would be 
required to actuate the exploding mechanism 
of his ingenious bomb, and it did not explode 
immediately, as expected. The dog and 
bomb, consequently, hurtled through space 
like a comet with a head on both ends of the 
tail. 

On the dog's arrival, Sukyanna was going 
about her household duties, with a book in 
one hand written by Miriam Mushroom on 
The Transcendentalism of the Universal, 
and Its Eelevancy to the Elevation of Wom- 
anhood; while, with the other hand, di- 
rected only by subconscious mental process 
born of habit, she was preparing supper for 
Benjamin. She prided herself on that power 
of concentration and absorption, so common 
to the artistic temperament, which can re- 
[176] 



THE ELEVATION OF WOMANHOOD 

sist for a while the battering-ram assaults 
on consciousness of howling children, bark- 
ing dogs, or a house on fire. 

As a result, she did not hear or see puggy 
as, with whine and din and clatter, he rushed 
into the room where she stood. Not receiv- 
ing the expected attention and consolation, 
puggy in his impatience circled around the 
human mother, entwining the shanks of her 
in the strong rawhide cord, until dog and 
bomb had effectually hobbled her skirts, 
when, tripping, she went down on both. 

This mean trick on the part of Benjamin 
bruised her artistic soul and proved far too 
much; she instantly separated from Ben- 
jamin — ^in the direction of the empyrean. 

She had at last achieved the realization of 
the Elevation of Womanhood. 



[177] 



DIDN^T KNO(W IT WAS LOADED 

AT the works of the Maxim-Nordenfelt 
/-\ Company in England, when some of 
the early experiments with smokeless 
powders were being made in that company's 
laboratory, a strong hydraulic cylinder, which 
had been employed for compressing experi- 
mental explosive materials, was thrown out 
of commission by the ram, or plunger, stick- 
ing in the cylinder. The cylinder was taken 
to the shop, and the job of getting the 
plunger out of it was given to one of the 
workmen. He thereupon commenced in his 
own peculiar way by heating the cylinder 
over a forge, thinking to expand it suffi- 
ciently to allow the plunger to be removed. 
He succeeded before long, with an effectu- 
ality that perfectly dumbfounded his slow 
sense of expedition. The contained explo- 
sive naturally ignited, and the plunger was 
blown out like a shot from a cannon. The 
cylinder itself was blown downward, de- 
molishing the forge, passing through the 
[178] 



DIDN'T KNOm IT WAS LOADED 

plank floor, and burying itself in tlie ground, 
while the plunger whizzed upward through 
the roof, and disappeared in the direction of 
Scotland. 



[179] 



THE WEONG TAP 

THE worker among high explosive ma- 
terials must never relax his ceaseless 
vigilance. Not only his own life, but 
also the lives of those working at his side, 
hang upon the thread of infinite care. This 
fact is emphatically illustrated by an experi- 
ence of my own, while conducting some ex- 
periments with a continuous process for 
making nitroglycerin which I had invented. 

Orders were waiting, and it would take a 
week of constant labor on my part to com- 
plete the apparatus. I therefore crowded 
the week into three days, working constantly 
day and night, without a moment's sleep or 
rest. 

I had thought out every detail of the 
process with the utmost care. I had tested 
every step, unit by unit, so I was confident 
not only that the process would prove suc- 
cessful, but also that it would be safe to 
operate. 

On the forenoon of the third day, every- 
[180] 



THE WRONG TAR 

thing being at last in readiness, I now pre- 
pared to turn on the acids and the glycerin. 
I was well aware of the grim possibilities of 
my being killed, for if I had made a mis- 
calculation or any wrong determination, I 
knew that my life might be the forfeit. I 
gave little thought to the likelihood of my 
being incautious due to the tremendous 
strain to which I had so long subjected my- 
self. As it happened, I was so worn out that 
at the very outset I turned on the glycerin 
first, instead of the acids. My hand was ac- 
tually upon the acids tap before I realized 
my error. 

In that vital moment, some secret sense or 
instinct called back my wandering wits in the 
nick of time, and, shuddering, I dropped my 
fingers from the tap. Had I turned it on 
after the glycerin began to flow, I must in- 
evitably have been blown to pieces. 



[181] 



''WHENCE ALL BUT HIM HAD FLED" 

I HAVE a literary friend by the name of 
Marvin Dana, who, although he was for 
years editor of the Smart Set, once 
failed in a bit of a priori perspicuity. Some 
Italians were blasting out a bit of rock at 
Landing for the foundation of a new bridge, 
to carry the roadway over the railroad in 
that village. They had just finished charg- 
ing a big, deep hole with dynamite, and had 
lighted the fuze, when Marvin started to 
cross the temporary bridge with his usual 
measured stride of ever-conscious dignity. 
The Italians, who had withdrawn to a safe 
distance, seeing him coming, and they being 
unable to speak English, gesticulated wildly, 
and pointed excitedly in the direction of the 
blast under the bridge. 

The litterateur concluded that there must 

be something extraordinary going on down 

below there — something quite worth looking 

at, and, walking directly above the blast, 

[182] 



"WHENCE ALL BUT HIM HAD FLED'' 

leaned over the bridge and looked down. 
Just at that instant the mine exploded. 

He was, happily, nnhurt by any of the fly- 
ing stones and debris, but the knock-down 
argument of the shock from the blast con- 
vinced him that such carelessness on the part 
of those Italians, with never a guard to wave 
a red flag warning pedestrians, was, indeed, 
truly shocking. 



[183] 



BEEAKING HIS NERVE 

JUST back upon the Mils that rise up 
from the southern shores of Lake Ho- 
patcong, there is one of the most im- 
portant dynamite works in the country. 
James Wentworth began his labors there 
first as an errand boy, at the age of twelve, 
soon after the works started. It was his 
brag that he had grown up with the works, 
but that he had never gone up with them, 
although he had seen many another go up, 
when, on occasion, by some freak of chance, 
a packing-house or a nitroglycerin apparatus 
would be blown to the four winds of heaven, 
spraying wreckage of men and timber over 
the whole celestial concave. 

Jim had no lack of courage. He had 
worked in every department of the business ; 
had made nitroglycerin and nitrogelatin, and 
had become one of the most skillful dynamite 
packers. As he did piece-work, he made 
money rapidly. 

One day, at a church strawberry festival, 
he was drawn into the vortex of that swirl- 
[184] 



BREAKING HIS NERVE 

ing passion, love, and married. The young 
wife importuned him to give up the dyna- 
mite business, as he had already laid up 
sufficient money to start him in another busi- 
ness. Yielding to her wishes, he gave notice 
that his resignation was to take effect at the 
end of two weeks. 

On the third day of the period of his 
notice, on the advent of the noon hour, he 
was seized with an uncontrollable impulse to 
take his dinner-pail and himself out of the 
packing-house where he was working. He 
said afterward that he got to thinking, ^ ^ Sup- 
pose this packing-house should blow up; 
what would become of Susie 1 ' ' — to say noth- 
ing of his own dispersion. 

He went to the top of an elevation to eat 
his dinner, in full view of the packing-house, 
continuing his pessimistic reflections. 

The place began to look suspicious. For 
the first time in his life he felt fear. On a 
sudden, that packing-house became a white, 
dazzling ball of flame, and he was knocked 
down by the concussion. 

He told the superintendent that the three 
days he had served on his notice must suffice 
— ^he had lost his nerve ! 

[ 185 ] 



THE GEIZZLY CANNON BALL 

IN the early days, when there was more 
individual and less corporate mining in 
the gold country of the West, a long and 
lean Yankee, Jim Evans, who was once a 
neighbor of mine in Maine, contracted the 
gold-fever, and went West. 

Luckily, he almost immediately struck a 
pay streak high up the face of a cliff, where 
there was a wide shelf of rock that afforded 
a very convenient roadway for his use, as 
well as considerable area for the transac- 
tion of his operations. 

Someone before him had started opera- 
tions on the same site, but had become dis- 
couraged and quit, leaving a big steel tank, 
open at one end, lying upon its side, the open 
end pointing, like a huge cannon, over the 
mining settlement a thousand feet below. 
Jim used this tank to warehouse certain edi- 
bles, together with a keg of black gun- 
powder. 

One day, on Jim's return from grubbing in 
[186] 



TEE GRIZZLY. CANNON BALL 

the ground, lie was amazed to find the en- 
trance to his warehouse blocked by a huge 
grizzly bear that had crawled in to get at the 
edibles, and that fitted the big tube like a wad 
in a gun. 

Jim was addicted to humor, and as there 
was a three-quarter-inch hole in the tank 
near the closed end right over the keg of gun- 
powder, the head of which had been re- 
moved, it occurred to him that he might 
make it somewhat interesting for the bear 
by lighting a piece of fuze and dropping it 
into the gunpowder. This he proceeded to 
do, and the bear proceeded to leave that tube 
after the manner of a cannon ball. 

Hearing the report, and seeing a large 
volume of smoke, the townspeople, looking 
skyward and Jim-ward, were astonished at 
seeing a ton of grizzly hurtling outward 
from Jim's place and descending upon them. 

On Jim's return to the village that eve- 
ning, he was surrounded by numerous inter- 
rogators regarding the bear. ^^Oh,'' he 
said, casually, *'I found the bear in my 
shack, and just threw him out, that's all." 



[1871 



THE JOKE WAS NOT ON THE 
CHINAMEN 

WHEN the Alaskan gold excitement 
was at its height, a couple of ad- 
venturous spirits, prospectors from 
California, had expended several months of 
precious, good old summer-time and ex- 
hausted their resources in an endeavor to lo- 
cate pay dirt by sinking a shaft into a nar- 
row table of land which jutted out from a 
high mountain near its base. 

After thawing and grubbing and blasting 
through fifty feet of earth, with no gold in 
sight, they came upon solid ice underlying 
the cover of earth through which they had 
penetrated. 

They kept on, however, for several weeks 
more, in an endeavor to penetrate through 
the ice ; but they found ice, and only ice, for 
another fifty feet. 

Then it was that it occurred to them to 
salt that ice with fine gold dust and sell out 
to some tenderfoot sucker. 
[188] 



JOKE WAS NOT ON THE CHINAMEN 

They very easily found the desired vic- 
tims in two Chinamen, with evident ample 
means and sufficient lack of experience. 

The two prospectors had about a ton of 
dynamite on hand. This they lowered into 
the shaft and concealed it in a side drift just 
deep enough and big enough to hold it, cal- 
culating that the first shot fired by the 
Chinamen would set off the dynamite and, by 
completely demolishing the shaft, conceal 
their fraud. 

The first blast made by the Chinamen did 
explode the dynamite, which not only 
wrecked the shaft, but also lifted the whole 
jutting bit of tableland — ice, earth, every- 
thing — sending it — an avalanche — down the 
mountain slope several hundred feet, expos- 
ing a thick stratum of glacial detritus, under 
where the ice had been, so full of gold that 
it proved to be one of the richest finds ever 
made in Alaska. The one blast had made the 
Chinamen millionaires. 



X 189 ]| 



CHINESE FIEEiWOEKS 

DURING the gold-digging days of Cali- 
fornia, before there was a restriction 
imposed npon the immigration of 
Chinese, a big American sailing vessel, while 
in Chinese waters, had taken aboard a large 
cargo of fireworks and a few tons of gun- 
powder of a special brand, which was safely- 
housed in the hold, while all the sleeping 
quarters except those occupied by the crew, 
and all available deck spaces, were filled with 
a cargo of coolies to man California mines. 

The vessel was one of those staunch, fast, 
sail-driven craft brought to their highest 
perfection in the shipyards of Maine just be- 
fore the advent of the steamship. 

When the ship was about a day out on its 
homeward voyage, the captain learned, 
through his faithful Chinese cook, that a big 
part of the Chinamen that he had picked up 
were half-breed Malay and Chinese pirates 
who had taken passage for the sole purpose 
of capturing the ship for piratical purposes, 
[190] 



CHINESE FIREWORKS 

and that they were armed to the teeth, so 
that resistance offered by his crew of only 
twelve would be utterly hopeless. 

While the captain was deliberating upon 
what to do, word was brought by his cook 
that the pirate horde were beginning to act 
very ugly, and had already taken posses- 
sion of the fore part of the vessel, prepara- 
tory to a final assault upon the crew. 

The captain 'ordered two lifeboats im- 
mediately to be filled with water and provi- 
sions and lowered, while he went below decks 
and lighted a train to the cargo of gunpow- 
der and fireworks. Then the captain and his 
crew, together with the Chinese cook, manned 
the lifeboats and pulled away, to the amaze- 
ment of the Chinese pirates, who seemed 
immensely pleased that they had captured 
the ship without a struggle. 

The captain and the crew, in his two boats, 
lay on their oars at a safe distance quietly 
watching events, while the ship, which had 
now been turned about, was sailing away 
landward. When at a distance of about half 
a mile, that ship turned volcano. The whole 
above- water portion went up into the air 
with a belch of fire and thunder-roar like 

[ 191 ] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

another Krakatoa, whose eruption shook the 
whole earth in 1883. 

In their upward flight, Chinamen raced 
with rockets, while the heaven was filled with 
burning fireworks — and then it rained China- 
men. In fact, it was a real cloudburst of 
Chinamen, fire-crackers and ship 's wreckage. 



[192 J 



BEO.WN, THE GUNNER 

FOR many years, all inventors and 
manufacturers having occasion to at- 
tend experiments with their produc- 
tions at the Naval Proving Grounds at In- 
dian Head, were aided in their work by 
Brown, the gunner. He was a very ingeni- 
ous, genial, gigantic fellow, one of the most 
likable men in the world. There was noth- 
ing about the mechanism of guns and gun- 
nery unfamiliar to him. 

Once, during the early years of his service 
there, a fragment from an exploding gun 
struck him in the forehead, leaving a great 
dent. As soon as he recovered, he returned 
to his duties undeterred, although he had had 
many other close calls. 

One day, a few years ago, he walked in on 
me at my summer home on Lake Hopatcong. 
During his visit, he asked me if I believed 
in presentiments. He said he had had a very 
strange presentiment of impending danger 
in his work at Indian Head. He told me that 
[193] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

he had confided this to the commanding 
officer there, who laughed at him, and said, 
^*0h, Brown, at last you are losing your 
nerve. Go and take a two weeks' vacation, 
and then come back/' 

Brown did go back at the end of his 
vacation. 

A few weeks later, while testing a new 
heavy gun, something went wrong. The 
breech block blew out, and Brown was 
knied. 



[194] 



THE HAPPENING OF THE UNEX- 
PECTED 

SOME time ago, a young lady who had 
been my private secretary for about 
four years got married. Thinking that 
one of the best ways of securing another 
competent stenographer and typist to take 
her place would be to go to an employment 
agency, Mrs. Maxim and I called upon the 
manager of one of those institutions. 

Mrs. Maxim, according to the habitude of 
her sex, led in the conversation. She told 
the manager about the unusual requirements 
that the person engaged must have — that she 
must have a good general education, must 
be very expert as stenographer and typist, 
and above all, must be an exceptionally good 
speller. Furthermore, Mrs. Maxim placed 
especial emphasis upon one stipulation — • 
that we did not want a girl under twenty or 
a woman over thirty-five, for the reason that 
a girl under twenty is very apt to lack the 
necessary experience and serious-minded- 
[195] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

ness for such a position, while a woman 
around and above forty is apt to be set in 
her ways, and to lack the necessary flexibil- 
ity of mind and nature readily to adapt her- 
self to anything to which she has not always 
been accustomed, and is, furthermore, likely 
to be unable to learn anything new with the 
facility of a younger person. 

The manager was all suavity, pleasant 
manners and promises, and assured us that 
he had on his waiting list a number of young 
women who would exactly meet our require- 
ments, and that he would send three of them 
over that very evening. 

We learned from the bit of experience 
which followed that employment agencies 
and those who are sent by them to apply for 
positions, are apt to be governed by reason- 
ing similar to that of the small boy, who, 
seeing an advertisement that twenty-five dol- 
lars ' reward would be paid for a Pekinese 
spaniel, thought it would do no harm to try, 
and so he called to claim the reward with 
a huge mongrel — a cross between a New- 
foundland and a St. Bernard. 

Well, at the appointed hour, two archaic 
dilapidations wafted themselves in upon us, 
[196] 



HAPPENING OF TEE UNEXPECTED 

who looked as though their nascency had a 
priority on the Stone Age and they had been 
vouchsafed to us among the antediluvian 
survivors of Noah's Ark. 

The first one — ^a slip of a girl of some 
sixty-seven to the nth-power summers and as 
many winters — betrayed her lack of typisti- 
cal experience by mistaking a national cash 
register for a typewriter. Then she con- 
fided in us the little confidence that she really 
knew nothing about typewriting as yet, but 
that, in the sweet long ago, in the days of 
auld lang syne, she used to drum quite a lot 
on the piano, and, consequently, she imagined 
that typewriting, being a sort of mere finger 
play, would come so easy to her that she 
would have little difficulty in acquiring the 
necessary aptitude on a typewriter to qualify 
for the position. 

The next applicant was a tall, slight, sinu- 
ous, willowy, sylph-like and ethereal creature 
of the hippopotamus variety, who floated 
into our presence like a breath of old winter, 
made sweet summer by the mingled odor of 
violets, lilacs, musk and new-mown hay. I 
gave her a short dictation, which she took 
down in longhand. I asked her why she did 

1 197 ] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

not write shorthand. She said she did write 
shortland, unless she was in a hurry. Con- 
templating her huge bulk, I insinuated that 
we should want someone a little lighter on 
her corns than she, as one of the desirable 
accomplishments in a private secretary was 
that she should be able to play tennis. She 
said that although she had never played ten- 
nis herself, still it ran in the family, be- 
cause her grandchildren were expert tennis 
players. 

When the third antique entered, the thing 
began to get monotonous, as Mark Twain 
remarked, when a mule had fallen through 
his tent three times in one evening. We 
were getting out of patience. I told the old 
lady at once that we did not want anyone 
under twenty or over thirty-five. She as- 
sured me that she was not under twenty. I 
told her that I had guessed as much, and 
asked, *^How about the other limit! '' She 
sharply retorted that she had never, in all 
her life, touched thirty-five. *'Well," said I, 
*4f that be so, you must have been skidding 
some when you went by that numeral." 

Disappointed, and highly indignant, we 
called again the next day upon that manager 
[198] 



HAPPENING OR THE UNEXPECTED 

of the employment agency. He was pro- 
foundly apologetic, and said that he happened 
to have waiting in another room a young 
lady who was exactly what we wanted. She 
was immediately asked into the private office, 
where Mrs. Maxim and I examined her. She 
was about twenty-five years of age, and was, 
as they say down in Maine, as smart as a 
steel trap. I gave her a dictation replete 
with multi-syllabic terminology, and with un- 
usual words of difficult orthography, but she 
took down everything with lightning speed, 
read back her notes to perfection, and tran- 
scribed them rapidly on the typewriter with- 
out a mistake. 

We asked for what salary she would be 
willing to come to us. The salary asked was 
pretty high, but we instantly agreed to pay 
it. The manager and the young lady ex- 
changed glances, and both looked a bit sur- 
prised. Mrs. Maxim and I then asked if we 
might talk with the young lady alone for a 
few minutes. 

After some Sherlock Holmesy talk with 

the young woman, Mrs. Maxim and I came 

to the conclusion that she was a show girl 

kept by the manager merely to prove that 

[199] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

he had the goods when required, provided 
anyone wished to pay a sufficiently high 
salary, and the salary was made high enough 
to deter most applicants. We got it from 
the girl that she had several times been hired 
and had worked a few days for each of a 
number of employers, until she could find 
some rational excuse for breaking away and 
returning to the agency, the manager of 
which, we also learned, was her brother, and 
she was a partner in the business. 

The incident reminded me of a story told 
by a friend of mine in New York who bought 
a beautiful and highly trained Scotch terrier 
of a Broadway dog vendor, thinking that 
after keeping the dog tied up for a week, feed- 
ing him and treating him with kindness, he 
could be depended upon to stay with his new 
master, but the moment the dog was freed he 
disappeared, and the next day he was again 
with his master, the dog vendor, ready to be 
resold. Some time later, a light was thrown 
upon the inner consciousness of my friend 
by reading an account in the newspapers of 
the arrest of the dog vendor for obtaining 
money under false pretenses and practicing 
fraud in the sale of dogs, or rather, of the 
[200] 



HAPPENING OF THE UNEXPECTED 

dog. The canine was a sort of homing- 
pigeon dog, trained, like a carrier pigeon, to 
return from each new master as soon as 
freed. The buying and selling of that one 
dog constituted the main business of the 
scamp. 

When our interview with the young woman 
was concluded, we started to leave the office 
in disgust, but at that moment a young 
woman of rather prepossessing appearance,, 
about thirty years of age, entered the office 
looking for a position. She explained that 
her late employer having gone to Europe, 
she was looking for a new place. 

After a critical examination, we found that 
she would meet our requirements very well. 
Then it developed that, having read in news- 
papers and magazines some of the accounts, 
highly colored by the writers of them, of how 
I cooked with high explosives and lighted my 
cigar with a stick of dynamite, and burned 
nitroglycerin in a lamp to light the room, 
she, being of a rather nervous temperament, 
was afraid of the prospective companionship 
with explosive materials. 

I assured her that the accounts were mis- 
representations of actual facts, and ex- 
[201], 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

plained that we lived at a very safe distance 
from any explosive works, and that she 
would be exposed to no danger whatsoever. 
I finally convinced her that our home was a 
safe place, and although still harassed with 
some doubts she decided to come with us. 

In the edge of the evening, after her ar- 
rival, she and I were sitting at the dining- 
room table engaged in conversation. I was 
telling her how groundless had been her 
fears, when there came a terrific explosion. 
The sky was lighted up with a brilliancy that 
would shame the noon-day sun, and frag- 
ments of brands from the burning fell all 
about the house. 

I confess that I was as much surprised as 
she was — and that was going some. I rushed 
out, and found that my tool-house, located 
about a hundred yards from my residence, 
had blown up, and the wreckage was on fire. 
Being sure that there were no explosives in 
the building, I was greatly puzzled. 

There were in the place at the time per- 
haps a hundred rounds of Mauser rifle car- 
tridges. These were exploding, one after 
another, from the heat. The neighbors who 
had run to witness the fire, were greatly 
[202] 



HAPPENING OF TEE UNEXPECTED 

frightened, and did not dare to render any 
assistance in putting out the flames, espe- 
cially while the cartridges were exploding. 

I ran to a hydrant nearby, got out the fire- 
hose, and found, to my amazement, what one 
usually finds under such circumstances, that 
the nozzle of the hose had been taken off, 
and the hose disconnected from the hydrant, 
and that there was no wrench there. I ran 
and got another hose and a wrench, made 
the connections, and ran out the hose to ex- 
tinguish the fire, when I found that only a 
small stream of water as big as my thumb 
flowed from the hose. I then ran down to 
my house to see if there were any faucets 
open which would reduce the pressure, and 
then to the pump-house to measure the water 
in the supply tank, and found that the tank 
was nearly full, and that thirty-five thou- 
sand gallons of water were available for ex- 
tinguishing the fire. Yet I could get no pres- 
sure. The result was that nothing was 
saved, and the building and all its contents 
were a complete loss. As there was no in- 
surance, the loss was about fifteen hundred 
dollars. 

After it was too late to save the building, 
[ 203 ]; 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

I walked down to the Hotel Durban, on my 
property, which I supplied with water, to 
calm the fears of some of the guests who 
were agitated, when, to my amazement, I 
found a two-inch fire-hose turned on full, 
and running in the road. I learned then that 
a stupid fellow who was staying at the hotel, 
had turned the water on at several fire hy- 
drants to play water on the hotel, although 
the hotel was at such a safe distance from the 
tool-house that there was not a particle of 
danger whatsoever. It never occurred to 
him to close off one hydrant when he opened 
another; consequently, the pressure was re- 
duced so that no water at all could be had 
at the scene of the fire, and not pressure 
enough on the hose-pipes that he had turned 
on to do any good even had they been 
needed. 

After things had quieted down, I returned 
to the house to resume my conversation, and 
to repeat my assurances to the young lady 
secretary, but I found a polite note tacked to 
the table-cloth, requesting that her trunk be 
forwarded the next day. She had not waited 
for further conviction as to the safety of hei; 
new position. 

[204] 



HAPPENING OF THE UNEXPECTED 

On investigation, I learned that a fire 
had started in the tool-house from some 
cause unknown, and had proceeded long 
enough to get one side of the interior of 
the building well ablaze. As there were 
five gallons of denatured alcohol in the 
place, and the same quantity of gasoline, and 
about ten pounds of sulphuric ether, it is 
probable that one of these had become heated 
and, bursting, set free a lot of vapor which, 
mixing with the atmosphere, exploded. There 
were also in the building about thirty pounds 
of finely pulverized aluminum, ten pounds 
of magnesium powder and other ingredients 
for flashlight powders, with which I intended 
to conduct experiments. As these materials 
were not mixed, they were not explosive, 
but their combustion was what produced the 
wonderful light when the explosion occurred. 
The result was not like that from an explo- 
sion of dynamite, in which case the building 
would have been literally blown to frag- 
ments, but, as is usual in gas explosions, the 
roof of the building was lifted up, the sides 
thrown out, and the roof dropped in. Even 
the front door of the building, charred from 
the initial fire, was found otherwise intact. 
[ 205 ], 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

While sitting on the porch of my house on 
Lake Hopatcong, dictating this story to my 
stenographer, and when I had arrived at 
this point, she suddenly called to me, 
**Look!'' pointing her finger across the 
Lake to a huge column of smoke going up 
from the Atlas Powder Works, and mush- 
rooming out into the sky. The direct dis- 
tance is about three miles, but it seemed quite 
a long time before we felt the shock and 
heard the sound. Although the sound was 
loud and the shock considerable, the sound 
was much louder and the shock much heavier 
even at longer distances in several direc- 
tions, owing, I imagine, to the difference in 
the underlying strata of earth. 

As I learned later, the explosion took 
place at one of the packing houses, which 
carried another packing house with it, to- 
gether with a nitroglycerin storehouse, so 
that about ten tons of dynamite, or its 
equivalent, went up in that column of smoke. 
I understand that seven men were killed, 
and about twice as many injured. It was 
the largest and most destructive explosion 
that had ever occurred at those works. 

[206] 



[WHEN THE .WASH VANISHED 

1WAS once invited to speak at a County 
Fair at Pittsfield, Massacliusetts, where 
I used to live when in the publishing 
business. My subject was Explosive Ma- 
terials and Their Use in Warfare. 

The management was especially desirous 
that I should give my auditors some sort of 
spectacular demonstration, to show what ex- 
plosives would do. A platform was erected 
in an open field, and I had an arena roped 
off at the rear of the platform about fifty 
feet wide, and running back several hundred 
feet. In the rear portion of this arena I 
buried several sticks of dynamite, and con- 
nected them with an exploder and a battery 
on the platform. 

Also, I brought several cotton bosom- 
shirts, several cotton undershirts, half-a- 
dozen handkerchiefs, a couple of towels, half- 
a-dozen pairs of cotton socks, and as many 
cheap cotton collars and cuffs. These I had 
12071 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

immersed in a concentrated mixture of nitric 
and sulphuric acids, converting them all into 
guncotton. Then I washed and soaked the 
acid out of them, and dried them. 

I stretched a clothes-line from the speak- 
er's platform to a distance of about thirty 
feet to my right, and on this I hung my gun- 
cotton clothes, only a few feet away from the 
front of the audience. 

There were, perhaps, a thousand people 
massed in front of me, crowding up close, 
that nothing should miss them. I made a 
brief talk on the nature and use of explo- 
sives, and burned some smokeless powder 
under water, and then I touched off the dy- 
namite in the rear of the field, which made 
a very pretty showing. 

The audience was very curious about that 
wash. That I should have hung my linen out 
to dry on that occasion they thought was very 
peculiar taste, to say the least; and some of 
them did not hesitate to say that they con- 
sidered it very bad taste. 

I then said to the audience that I must beg 

their pardon for displaying my underwear 

as I had done; that I appreciated the fact 

that it was an unsightly display, and, to ac- 

[208] 



WHEN THE WASH VANISHED 

commodate them, I would immediately pro- 
ceed to get it out of sight. I then touched 
it off with an electrical igniter, and that 
laundry disappeared in one great bright 
flash of flame. 

There happened to be in my audience an 
ingenious fellow with some knowledge of 
chemistry, who was a noted wag and prac- 
tical joker. Taking the hint from my ni- 
trated laundry, he nitrated a cotton hand- 
kerchief and sent it to the Chinese laundry 
with the rest of his wash. 

When he called for his clothes, he found 
John Chinaman with his right arm in a sling. 
However, John was all smiles, and apologized 
for the absence of the one handkerchief, but 
said nothing more about it. 

A short time after the fellow had put on 
his clean underwear, he developed a very 
severe case of prickly heat, followed, a little 
later, by a sensation like that of needles be- 
ing stuck into his body over the entire sur- 
face. Anyone who has taken a bite of a wild 
Indian turnip knows what that sensation is. 
The Chinaman had charged his customer's 
garments with a preparation extracted from 
a Chinese variant of the Indian turnip. It 
[209] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

took a couple of weeks, with the aid of a 
physician, for the wag to recover from the 
little unpleasantness which the Chinaman 
had inflicted upon him. 



[ 210 ] 



THE FEIGHTENED FISHEEMAN 

WHEN testing big guns at Sandy 
Hook, the officers are often greatly 
annoyed by fishing boats that per- 
sist in getting within range of the guns and 
in remaining there, entirely regardless of 
the work or wishes of the officers of Uncle 
Sam. 

It is a curious circumstance that, accord- 
ing to the law of the country, these ships 
have the right of way, and even the officers 
of the Government Proving Grounds have 
no power to compel a fishing smack to move 
out of range. 

There was one boat of this kind that per- 
sisted in anchoring daily exactly in the range 
of a ten-inch gun that was under test, and 
day after day the tests had to be delayed. 

One morning, however, there being a haze 
or fog floating close down upon the water at 
a distance of a couple of miles from the 
shore, and the sea looking perfectly clear to 
that distance, the officers in charge of the 
[211] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

testing of the gun concluded that the range 
was clear, and they fired, but the captain of 
the fishing boat above referred to happened 
to be on his job, just as usual, though con- 
cealed by the fog. He had stretched him- 
self out in a hammock on deck and was tak- 
ing a snooze, when a ten-inch projectile 
passed through his boat under him, and 
ricocheted on out to sea. He kept out of the 
gunner's range after that. 

Following this incident, one of the officers 
conceived the brilliant idea of keeping fisher- 
men from coming into the line of fire in the 
following manner: When a boat was seen 
sailing into range he would fire several six- 
pound shells, exploding them in the water 
along the line of range, and directly in the 
path of the oncoming boat. This method 
served the purpose admirably. While the 
fishermen would calmly cast anchor and oc- 
cupy a position directly in range of a gun 
being tested, they did not dare to sail di- 
rectly into the line of fire of exploding six- 
pound shells. 



[ 212 ] 



THE COLONEL WAS PROVOKED 

AN Army officer tells me the following 
story: 

One time, while he was on duty at 
the Sandy Hook Proving Grounds, they were 
testing a gun-shield to see whether or not it 
would resist the penetration of a six-inch 
shell. 

The officer whose duty it was to attend to 
the loading and firing of the gun did not al- 
ways allow the required time to elapse after 
sounding the warning before discharging the 
gun, especially when he took it for granted 
that no one was in the zone of danger, in 
which case he was apt to consider the signal 
of warning a mere formality. 

Such was his attitude and action on the 
occasion to which this story refers : He gave 
the signal, and immediately fired. The pro- 
jectile, which was expected to penetrate the 
shield, went only half through, and stuck 
there, when, to the horror of all participants, 
especially of the careless officer referred to, 
[213] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

the Colonel of Artillery emerged from be- 
hind the shield, unhurt, but madder than a 
demon in Dante's Inferno. 

No more guns were fired without the lapse 
of an ample period of warning. 



[ 214 ] 



WHEN THE DAEKIES TUENED PALE 

A T one of our Government proving 
/-% grounds, some years ago, the officers 
were testing a new high explosive, 
and, as was their custom, they charged a 
twelve-inch shell with the material in order 
to estimate the power of the explosive by the 
fragmentation of the projectile when the 
charge was detonated. 

They had a bomb-proof chamber prepared 
for this purpose. It consisted of a room 
about ten feet wide, twelve feet long, and 
eight feet high, lined with armorplate. The 
projectile was placed on the armored floor 
in the middle of the room, and covered 
with a few hundred pounds of fine sand. It 
was armed with an electrical exploder, which 
was set off from another bomb-proof at a 
safe distance. After each explosion, the 
fragments were sifted from the sand and 
counted and weighed. 

A twelve-inch shell charged with Maximite 
and exploded at Sandy Hook during the tests 
[215] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

there of that explosive, was broken into ten 
thousand fragments. The fragments made 
deep dents in the hard face of the armor- 
plate. The shell that enters into this story- 
was exploded under similar conditions. 

When the officers were ready to explode the 
shell, they sounded the usual alarm to give 
warning to laboring men on the premises to 
seek cover. Now, it so happened that about 
a dozen negroes who were engaged in some 
pick-and-shovel work had been in the habit 
of using this very bomb-proof as a shelter 
when a big gun was fired; consequently, 
when the warning was sounded, they im- 
mediately rushed for cover within that bomb- 
proof. 

The officer in command was about to close 
the switch to explode the projectile, and his 
hand was already upon it, but, being an ex- 
ceedingly cautious man, he thought he would 
take another look to be sure that all was safe, 
and, to his amazement, he saw a negro who 
had been screening himself behind a pile of 
rubbish making a dash for the bomb-proof 
containing the projectile, when it was re- 
vealed that the dozen darkies had all hud- 
dled into it for safety. 

[216] 



WHEN THE DARKIES TURNED PALE 

When those darkies found out how close a 
call they had had, they turned just as pale 
as negroes can turn. Had the projectile 
been exploded while they were in the bomb- 
proof, they would not only have all been 
killed by the blast, but would also have 
literally been blown to ribbons. 



1 217 ] 



THE DOG THAT WAS A EEAL MASCOT 

IN the long line of trenches that consti- 
tutes the French and British front, 
facing the equally long German front, 
the soldiers relieve time's tedium by nu- 
merous artifices. Many kinds of pets — 
dogs, cats, owls, doves, parrots — are har- 
bored for the sake of their company, or as 
mascots — ^bringers of good luck. 

A French soldier had a dog that was a 
great favorite in the trenches, for the reason 
that he was a famous ratter, and as the 
trenches were infested with rats, he was a 
most welcome guest. 

One day, when the Germans were bom- 
barding the French position before Verdun 
preparatory to a charge, a huge howitzer 
shell, penetrating deep into the earth in 
front of one of the French trenches, and ex- 
ploding, buried half a hundred men — among 
them the owner of the dog. 

The dog also was quite buried by the ex- 
plosion, but he quickly dug himself out, and 
[218] 



THE DOG THAT WAS A REAL MASCOT 

then he began an eager search for his mas- 
ter. Smelling out his location, he dug furi- 
ously with all his might to unearth him. 
Fortunately, his master ^s head was near 
the surface of the ground, but his arms 
and legs were bound tight so that he could 
not move, and he was nearly suffocated when 
the dog succeeded in digging out his head 
and face so that he could breathe. 

Happily, relief came soon, and when the 
rescuing party arrived, they found the dog 
still working with all his strength to uncover 
his master. 

Pick and spade soon brought the dog's 
quarry to the surface, who was quite un- 
harmed except for a few bruises, while the 
dog, it was seen, was bleeding at ears, eyes 
and mouth from the effect of the explosive 
blast. 



[219] 



WEARY WILLIE'S DISCOMFITURE 

SOME good old English, folk whose pros- 
perous son had made a large amount of 
money in the railroad business in 
America, were persuaded by their boy to give 
up their fine, old-fashioned English country 
home for such home life as America could 
afford. 

The dutiful son had anticipated the wants 
and pleasures of his parents, and on a fine 
country estate he had built practically a 
replica of the old English homestead. There 
was the big fireplace and the big, wide chim- 
ney, to be swept by the smutty chimney- 
sweep. The chimney was provided with pegs 
to climb up and down. 

Some time after the good parents were 
quartered in their new home. Weary William 
the wanderer, a real hobo, walking past the 
place late one night, could see enough of it 
in the moonlight to recognize its genuine 
English aspect ; for Weary Willie had, in his 
boyhood days, been one of those smut-faced 
[220] 



WEARY. WILLIE'S DISCOMFITURE 

chimney-sweeps in old England, and when he 
walked up and peeped through the window 
and saw a few embers in the familiar fire- 
place, he concluded to go down that chironey 
and take a nap in the cosy comfort that the 
room provided, and perchance find some- 
thing to eat and drink without waking any- 
one. 

Entering the room by way of the chimney, 
he did find, all set as though for himself, 
edibles and wine — ^left-overs from someone's 
late supper. 

After feasting, he took a snooze on the 
sofa, intending to take his leave the way he 
came at an early hour before the family 
was up, but he had drunken more of the 
good wine than he ought, and he slept 
soundly. He was awakened by voices, which 
told him that it was high time and past for 
him to make his exit, and he scooted up the 
chimney in great haste, but not a whit too 
quickly, for by the time he had raised himself 
up out of sight, several persons entered 
the room. He did not dare continue his 
ascent or move for fear of making a noise. 
He waited there, breathless, for a more fa- 
vorable opportunity to climb out. 
[221], 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

It so happened that an ingenious Yankee 
neighbor of the English gentlefolk had sug- 
gested a more expeditious way of clean- 
ing the chimney than by sweeping it out in 
the old British fashion. He said that all that 
was necessary was to throw several pounds 
of black gunpowder into the fire, which, flash- 
ing, would blow the soot out of the chimney. 
Of course, the genius had never tried the 
experiment himself, but as such geniuses are 
usually cocksure, he was so confident of suc- 
cess that he did not feel he need to make any 
preliminary experiments. Therefore, just 
as the tramp had mounted above the line of 
vision into the chimney, the genius, entering 
the room, threw the gunpowder into the fire, 
which instantly exploded with a great flash 
and smoke, blowing cinders and embers all 
over the room and filling it with dense, black, 
sulphurous smoke, burning the face and 
hands of the genius considerably, and fright- 
ening the elderly people out of their 
wits. But what frightened them all still 
more, was the appearance of the thoroughly 
singed and scared tramp, who fell from 
his perch in the chimney, down into the 
fireplace, and rolled out into the room, 
[ 222 ] 



WEARZ WILLIE'S DISCOMFITURE 

sneezing, coughing and saying things, all at 
once. 

The terrified tramp was easily secured, 
and when the master's gold watch — a gift 
from royalty and a family heirloom — ^was 
found upon his person, the genius was not 
only forgiven for his miscalculated experi- 
ment, but also thanked for his good oflSces. 



[223]j 



LO, THE POOR INDIAN! 

DAVE KING, editor of the Morris 
County Press, Morristown, New Jer- 
sey, was reared a lariat man in the 
Wild and Woolly, in the days before civili- 
zation, rum and guns had subdued the 
Cheyennes, the Comanches and the Sioux to 
extinction or to the more uncongenial fate 
of enforced good behavior. 

In all of Dave 's hair-ruffling experiences — 
corralling stampeding long-horns, lassoing 
and riding a bull-buffalo bare-back, hunting, 
with Eex Beach, the great Kadiak bear in 
Alaska, whose enormous bulk and Ivan-the- 
Terrible disposition would by comparison 
make the grizzly of the Eocky Mountains a 
gentle companion — ^his most intimately inter- 
esting, close-to-nature adventure was when 
he was ten years old, and dwelt upon the 
upper waters of the Arkansas. 

Dave's father, a husky pioneer, accom- 
panied by his ten-year-old son, his brother, 
** Uncle Joe," an assortment of dogs, guns 
[224] 



LO, THE POOR INDIAN! 

and ammunition, embracing a dozen kegs of 
gunpowder, had gone there to stake a squat- 
ter's claim, hunt buffalo and grow up with 
the country. 

Timber was scarce, so, after the manner 
of the troglodyte, they burrowed out a room 
in the side of a hill, which constituted at once 
cook-room, dining-room and parlor, and also 
museum of rare weapons, dog-kennel and 
powder-magazine. The cook-stove was placed 
in the middle of the room, and the flue was 
run up through the ground for ventilation 
and the escape of products of combustion. 

One day, Dave's father and Uncle Joe 
went on a buffalo hunt, much to the discon- 
solation of Dave, who wanted to go along. 
Toward the end of the afternoon following 
the departure of the hunters, Dave built a 
roaring fire in the stove to keep himself com- 
pany, and incidentally to prepare supper 
for himself and the hunters, who were ex- 
pected to return before sundown. 

His eyes regarded longingly a double-bar- 
reled shotgun hung on the wall. He had 
many times been warned by his father to 
exercise caution in handling the guns during 
his absence, but Dave had the dare-devil 
[2251 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

spirit of his parent, with the added impulses 
of the small boy, and he took down the shot- 
gun and fondled it lovingly, examining its 
firing mechanism. Then he proceeded to re- 
turn it to its hanging, not noticing that he 
had left one of the hammers cocked. He did 
not know that the gun was loaded, and he 
would not have been deterred had he known. 
In putting up the weapon he accidentally 
touched the trigger of the cocked hammer 
and the charge in that barrel exploded, send- 
ing shot and burning wads under the sleep- 
ing-bunks, just missing one of the kegs of 
gunpowder. 

Dave proceeded with his cooking, but soon 
he smelled smoke, and looking under the 
bunks discovered, to his horror, that a fire 
had started. Under the bunks he went, 
pawed at the fire with his hands, and smoth- 
ered it with his hat, until he thought that he 
had extinguished the last spark. Then he 
started for a water-hole an eighth of a mile 
distant, to get a pail of water, accompanied 
by his favorite dog. 

When he got out into the open, he saw a 
dozen horsemen just coming into view over 
a rising ground between him and the sinking 
[226] 



LO, TEE POOR INDIAN! 

sun. He thought at first that his father was 
bringing company home to dinner, and he 
waited and watched. But he soon saw by 
the feathered and blanketed make-up and 
demeanor of the horsemen that they were 
savages on the warpath. 

Dave was not long getting himself and his 
dog out of sight in a badger-hole which he 
had, during many days of hard labor, en- 
larged for a playhouse. 

The Indians were a party of Cheyennes 
who had been forcibly located in the Indian 
Territory by the Grovernment. On this oc- 
casion, half a thousand of those fierce war- 
riors decided to go on the warpath and re- 
turn to their former hunting grounds in 
Wyoming. On their way they burned houses 
and slew and scalped everybody that fell in 
their path. Among many other outrages 
they, for a little diversion, killed and scalped 
a young woman school-teacher and forty 
pupils. United States troops then rounded 
them up and corralled them in Fort Kobin- 
son, Nebraska. One night they made a break 
to escape and the soldiers, now out of pa- 
tience, killed the whole bunch. 

But to return to Dave : When the Indians 
[227] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

saw the smoke coming out of the top of the 
ground, their curiosity was excited, and dis- 
covering that it was a dwelling they rode 
round it, red-man fashion, in a constantly 
narrowing circle, firing guns and war- whoop- 
ing. 

The dog hegan to bark and struggle to free 
himself to get after those Indians, but Dave 
thrust his hand into the animal's mouth, and 
grasping his lower jaw managed to keep him 
from barking. It took all of Dave 's strength 
to hold that dog, but he knew that it meant 
life or death, for if the dog should escape 
he would betray their hiding-place. 

The Indians, finding no sign of life in the 
dugout except the barking dogs that Dave 
had shut in, came closer and closer. Half a 
dozen of them got up on the top of the dug- 
out, and the others bunched themselves in 
close to the entrance, preparatory to rushing 
the place. 

But Dave had not succeeded in extinguish- 
ing the last spark of the fire that he had 
started under the bunks, so, coincidentally 
with the Indians arranging themselves about 
the cavern, the twelve kegs of gunpowder 
went into action. 

[ 228 ]; 



LO, TEE POOR INDIAN! 

Dave could not imagine what had hap- 
pened. He thought that possibly the Indians 
had captured the gunpowder and exploded it 
purposely, but he did not dare to emerge 
from his hiding. 

There was an interval of silence. There 
were no more war-whoops, and he concluded 
that the Indians had departed. They had, 
but not exactly in the manner that Dave 
imagined. 

The parent and Uncle Joe, returning on 
the edge of evening, were dumbfounded at 
finding only a great hole in the ground where 
the dwelling had been. Dave ^s father wrung 
his hands and bemoaned the loss of his boy, 
while Uncle Joe consoled him with the usual 
I-told-you-so that he ought not to have kept 
the gunpowder in the place. 

They began a diligent search for any 
souvenirs of Dave that might have happened 
to return to Mother Earth. After they had 
gathered up about a wagon-load of the dis- 
integrated Indians, Uncle Joe suggested that 
they must be on the wrong scent. 

At this puzzling juncture, Dave, hearing 
the voices of his father and Uncle Joe, cau- 
tiously emerged from his hiding. .When he 
[229] 



DYNAMITE STORIES 

came in sight, Uncle Joe said, ^'There's 
Dave now ! There 's your boy ! ' ' His father 
looked blankly at him for a moment. Though 
the vision looked like Dave he could not trust 
it. He said, **No, it can't be my boy! It 
can't be my boyP' 
But it was ; and Dave is still with us. 



[230] 

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